On the way home from a business trip to Melbourne last week I was delighted when the seat next to me was filled by Best & Less CEO Holly Kramer.
It had been six months since we caught up for lunch. It was the week of the launch of Women’s Agenda and Holly had just been handed the challenge of steering the discount department store to a promising new direction.
Fast forward six months and Holly is a woman with a mission to revitalize the 48-year-old discount chain owned by South African investment group Pepkor.
Holly was on her way home from an all-capital city week-long roadshow to show off her first season’s fashion range and reinforce the importance of a customer-centric approach. Other exciting changes you can expect to see when the new winter stock hits the stores at the end of the week include visual merchandising, following the recent appointment of a TopShop-trained expert, originally from Scotland, to this newly created permanent role. This marks a departure from the no-frills strategy of the past including the slogan that the discount retailer was most famous for: you don’t pay for any fancy overheads.
“I have a great team and it feels like we are already making a difference,” she said.
It seems that much about the instore experience may be about to change, including the ‘best’ style of fashions available at a ‘less’ price . Holly pulled a copy of the new-season catalogue out of her bag to proudly show me. She was wearing the same outfit as the model on the catalogue cover. I had actually been admiring her outfit as she walked down the aisle of the plane to her seat. The top will sell for $9 when it goes on sale with the winter range at the end of the month. Apparently during the week’s roadshow Holly dressed exclusively in the outfits featured in the new-season catalogue.
She spoke enthusiastically about her team and the changes they were making, quickly, to give customers reason to shop there. Time will tell if the choices she has made are the right ones but it was clear that Holly was thriving in the role.
Our flight back to Sydney was the last one of the day. We literally made curfew by one minute. The flight had been delayed by a few hours and Holly was clearly exhausted. But when she started talking about her the task ahead of her, she became animated.
My experience in retail leadership is limited to the period I spent as a director of private retailer, The Apparel Group. But Holly’s customer-experience approach made perfect sense given the fierce competition being mounted by online retailers.
Even though we do most of the shopping, women make up just 5% of leaders in retail in the UK and 3.8% in the US and the trend is similar here. Successful female CEOs in Australian retail include Sussan Group CEO and executive ehair Naomi Milgrom and Oroton CEO Sally MacDonald.
I have no doubt that with Holly’s solid business experience in a number of industries she will make a positive difference to retail in Australia. And when she does it will add another brick to the wall of successful female leadership that continues to rise. Let’s get behind her.