online fashion and lifestyle platform of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).  Here, Calmes sits down with Inside Retail to talk about all things operations, how The Iconic delivers packages to customers within hours, creating a new B2B venture, and what exactly is ‘bracketing’ and how it contributes to the returns issue. Inside Retail: I understand that you’ve been looking to address the issue of bracketing at The Iconic, can you tell me a bit more about that? Jere Calmes: ‘Bracketing’ is a word I discovered once I got to Australia. It is what you do when you go into a store, pick a few sizes – let’s say 4, 6 and 8 – and you take them all to the dressing room. You try all three on, and you select the one that fits best. Bracketing for an e-commerce business presents a returns issue, as customers order multiple items of the same SKU, just in different sizes, to see which one fits best, and return the others. I wouldn’t call it a massive issue at The Iconic, I think, in general, returns are a big element of an e-commerce strategy. Having easy and most of the time free returns makes a lot of sense if you’re going to compete in e-commerce, because it’s all about the customer experience. But bracketing is just a simple fact of what is happening in the industry and, quite frankly, until size standards and technology get to a level that makes it easy for the customer, it’s not something that will just get solved. It’ll probably exist for quite a while. IR: If bracketing isn’t going away, what steps are you taking to mitigate the impacts of this on the business? JC: I think the best way to look at it is in terms of returns. The Iconic returns have run around 30 per cent of everything that’s sold, and of that, almost half of it is due to sizing issues. So of that, what’s actually bracketing? I don’t know, but if somebody returns something, we take detailed information about why they returned it, and sizing comes up 48 per cent of the time. So I’m assuming that’s one of the main reasons people select more than one item when they’re shopping on The Iconic. Our intentions are to bring those numbers down in the long run, and to do that through many different initiatives, from improved technology, sizing guides and user interfaces – incentivising customers to be more conscious about it and do it less. There are plenty of activities we’re undertaking to bring that broader number of returns down. When The Iconic launched, it was very disruptive to what we were doing. Over the last 13 years, we’ve grown into a leading fashion lifestyle platform, and it’s necessary that our customers feel at absolute ease when they’re ordering something online, it’s all part of the entire customer experience. IR: Can you elaborate on how you plan to decrease the returns rate from 30 per cent, without being detrimental to the customer experience and value proposition that free returns present? JC: Among our customers, 1 per cent generate about 30 per cent of our returns.  Hassle-free and free returns are a reason why customers love The Iconic and we don’t intend to change that. Having said all that, we need to bring that number of returns down. Our business model works with the number of returns being that high, which is good, but now we basically need to bring that number down because it creates extra work and extra cost. There is a sustainability element to it, albeit not too massive, but it exists nonetheless. Then there are, of course, the abusers. And there are people who just flat out use the service with malice. And in that case, you need to have a fair use policy and take action. In our case, it’s been almost non-existent, but it happens. IR: We always have those outliers on either end, which is unfortunate. On the subject of creating extra work and outliers, implementing the new OWMS was a huge undertaking for The Iconic. What impact has this transition made? What are the external-facing benefits to the consumer of implementing this OWMS? JC: The new OWMS is a gamechanger for The Iconic. Everything we do is on a screen for our customers, and then, within a very short time, need to find whatever they’ve ordered, pick it, pack it, and send it on its way. You can get your delivery sometimes within three hours. Even 13-year-old companies like The Iconic get legacy systems; our [former] OWMS was rather monolithic – which many companies go through. We set it up for how we worked when The Iconic started and needed to adjust it to make it much more flexible, allowing for more delivery capabilities, services and improved value propositions for our partners. And we needed it to decrease the cost of operations of our fulfilment processes. This kind of system is the heart of our operations, and when it runs smoothly, the operations run healthily and customers get their deliveries on time. Now we do that at a fraction of the cost that we used to do it, increasing our automation inside our fulfilment centres. It gives us a lot more flexibility to do a lot of things. We have more propositions our customers can benefit from since launching the new OWMS – our twilight delivery service to Brisbane and Melbourne is one of those. IR: As a business, what are the cost savings? Are you experiencing immediate ROI internally? JC: Well, any investment pays off over time. The question is, how much time? This investment pretty much will pay for itself within a year to a year-and- a-half, if I just take the productivity indicators alone. IR: Can you walk us through the timeline for this undertaking? When did the new OWMS take over from its predecessor entirely? JC: We finalised the last remnants of it in October 2024, because there were some final returns processes that were still run over the old system. The teams were based in Southeast Asia, where the new system was originally built and used by our sister companies. Our team here in Australia got together and it was decided we’d go live with the new OWMS on January 1, 2024. We started with one SKU and progressively ramped it in the first half of the year and got the processes working properly and any bugs worked out. It was basically like moving your entire warehouse from ‘warehouse one’ to ‘warehouse three’. And on January 1, we launched the first SKU. By the time we got to five SKUs, we started having some fun with it and selling The Iconic shirts to internal [staff] ‘Iconic customers’ to see how it would go. A lot of people were able to buy an Iconic T-shirt for $1. It was a project that drew a lot of attention to making the business more efficient to compete better. We needed to do this to make our company flexible and agile enough to continue with the service levels and new services that we bring to market. As a new CEO, it was a great corporate-wide project to use as the symbol of our reset. The whole company got behind it. We launched it, and even the people who originally thought of the proof of concept were a bit surprised that we were able to get it up and running so quickly. And it took us into the second half of 2024, even to the fourth quarter, with such a massive increase in sales. We’re really happy to have that scalability and flexibility, and we ran it without any real big hiccups. The customers had no idea there was a huge operational transformation occurring in the back-end and the whole point of ramping up very, very quickly was to absolutely minimise [their awareness of it] and what we would consider to be a customer experience that was not as good – getting multiple packages. We like to consolidate them, which is also good for the environment. Our old OWMS is gone, it served its purpose and helped The Iconic become the leading company that we are. But, you constantly need to progress and as services become more and more complex, you need to break down your internal systems into many elements that allow you to do these micro services. That’s now what we have and it will allow us to go even further. One of the best things about being at The Iconic is that it’s a digital-first company, so everything is based on the data. The data is so democratised inside the system, all the employees have access to it and all decisions are taken on the basis of it. IR: The business is quite the vanguard in the sector, what’s The Iconic doing to remain competitive in a buzzing e-commerce landscape in Australia and New Zealand? JC: A vanguard, I like that. In 2023, we were suffering a bit. We had come off the back of Covid-19 and had our scope on this wonderful growth for the foreseeable future, and things just didn’t go that way. So 2024 was a bit of a reset in how we approached the business and we made progress with new technologies and infrastructure. We are a digital player with all the right technology and innovation. In retail, more parts of the sales process are moving online. People will always go to the store, that’s great, but they will try to discover and buy what they want, when they want, and you need to have a company that’s in the middle of that. We’re not a simple retailer. We don’t just buy and sell online. What we’ve created using our tech, innovation and relationships, is a platform business that enables the entire industry to benefit from the things that we’re good at. There’s nobody today in Australia and New Zealand that has the fashion credentials and expertise and does e-commerce at the scale we do. Pulling those things together, we provide a wonderful solution for consumers, who get access to a much broader and more inspiring product assortment with a seamless customer experience. They get it with free returns and the business is local. A lot of the international players do charge for returns, or they’re not here, and they’re wonderful competitors – I don’t mean to talk that out – but I think that it really is what differentiates The Iconic and we’re very focused on it. We’ve invested in letting consumers know we’re here, as a fashion and lifestyle platform that stands for the best customer experience, has the broadest product assortment and that really does care about sustainability in a very difficult industry to do so. I’m really excited to have the chance to lead this team at The Iconic because it’s just such an amazing company. IR: I love how you so organically flowed on to what I want to talk about next – the platforms business venture of The Iconic. But first I just want to give you feedback on the ‘Got you looking’ campaign. The marketing team nailed that one; the rollout felt like it was everywhere and it was such a clever campaign and had me looking. Credit where credit is due as always, because sometimes it’s hard to know how all the hard work is being received. JC: It’s actually really important because, I mean, The Iconic is a loved brand. So to not be investing in our most valuable asset, which is our brand and how customers know us, and the trust we have with them, just seemed crazy. We’ve got a strong team across the board, it’s not just the marketing team, but they are fantastic. IR: OK platforms, can you walk me through this B2B offering from The Iconic? What is it? What does it look like, and how will this be a key pillar of the business’s strategy moving forward? JC: It’s actually rather complicated and I don’t know if I can simplify it as well as I can simplify some other things. We are an enabler for our brand partners, rather than a competitor. The platform enables us to offer everything that we’ve built and give it to our brand partners to use. They’re selling on The Iconic, but we’re not buying and selling their stock. We’re basically providing them a service, and the service is the discovery of their product and fulfilment – delivered at all the service levels The Iconic strives to achieve, which is better than anybody else in the market. We’re providing this platform service to them, like a third-party logistics company (3PL) but you extend that service to be able to have brand discovery, the customer experience, and the ability to combine different brand’s items into the one package, The Iconic’s packaging. Our ‘Fulfilled by The Iconic’ service is one of the more popular services, especially in 2024, we made massive inroads. This service makes a lot of sense to our brand partners and is powered by our optimised operations, further improved by the new OWMS and returns capabilities. On top of that, there are brands that want to build; they don’t want to put all their time and investment into a warehouse. We can help a lot with that, and in the future, we’ll be able to help brands sell from their own site and just fulfill it for them and/or from The Iconic. So these are all platform services. It turns The Iconic into a very special company for this part of the world, because we’re unique in that we become an enabler to the industry. It’s interesting, because we started the discussion around returns. This is probably one of the bigger benefits of the program, as when items get returned to The Iconic, about 48 per cent of them are sold within the same or next week, so our partners can leverage this without going through all the logistics and the expense. IR: So, it’s quite a bespoke service, it’s not a plug-and-play solution? JC: There are multiple services, at each level of the broader service guidelines. IR: You launched the ‘Fulfilled’ service in 2024, how many partners do you have onboard now and can you share a few? JC: We’re at about 40 partners now, and growing. Some of our biggest clients were international brands. We’re exclusive with Inditex and we’ve got Pull & Bear and Bershka. They’re on this so they supply us with the product, and we take care of it for them, and we have plenty more coming onboard. IR: Can you share what percentage of business the platform makes up for The Iconic? JC: I think the easiest breakdown would be of our net merchandise value (NMV), so what we sell. Our marketplace services now account for 30 to 33 per cent of business, and this is growing year-over-year. We expect to grow this much faster than our retail presence. Our retail is basically the traditional retailer model of selling and our marketplace model would be those platform-based services that we offer in terms of the dropship or the fulfilled buy. About 33 per cent of our overall revenue comes through those marketplace services, so it’s scaling on the revenue side, for marketing [retail media] we don’t have yet, but maybe in the future, we will. IR: I hesitate to ask the question, but are physical retail stores on the radar for The Iconic? JC: It’s not a direct focus for our company. It’s not on the radar screen, but you can never say never. We’ve done some offline activations, and recently launched a parcel collection point with our partner Hubbed in the Martin Place Metro precinct. If you are conveniently located in a high traffic area like the Metro precinct, customers can access the convenience of ordering from The Iconic to that hub. They can try on their orders there if they want and return them moments later if required. Or, similarly, they can take it home or to work, and return it next time they are passing through. This is a new way that people shop, and we’ve seen it in other markets, and it has taken off. I think you’ll see parcel points take off. People recognise their convenience and flexibility, which makes for a much better customer experience. So we’re constantly testing and filing different new things because we just need to make sure that whatever the customer wants, we give them. This story first appeared in the February 2025 issue of Inside Retail Australia magazine.