Last month, we launched our first Rising Stars of Retail report in the May issue of Inside Retail Australia’s quarterly magazine, a special feature highlighting some of the great under-the-radar talent in the industry from a wide range of departments. Each week, we will publish interviews with the inspiring people listed in the feature, where they reveal what motivates them, the work that they’re most proud of and the challenges that they’ve overcome. This week, we chat with Chris Sl
Slodyczka, head of marketing at camping brand Joolca.
What are some of the initiatives in your company that you’ve led that you’re most proud of and what has your impact on the business been like?
Perhaps this isn’t the most marketable way to answer this question, but there really isn’t any one single initiative that sticks out to me. We’re growing fast and things seem like a blur. You see a problem, you fix a problem, you move on. And you keep on doing that over and over again. And then you look back at some point, and things are a whole lot better than they were.
Some initiatives that come to mind are:
implementing a ‘track my pre-order’ feature on our website (because we found communicating with thousands of pre-order customers individually just wasn’t going to work);creating a framework and communicating regularly and honestly with customers about why their orders were delayed during 2020/2021 when it was the norm, which no doubt saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in what would have otherwise been refunds;setting up a central marketing metrics tracker to monitor the main metrics across all regions (at one point we had nothing and we were flying blind);learning how to forecast SKUs properly because we kept stocking out,turning off brand searches on Google because the incremental ROAS was around ~1, saving us thousands every month perpetually.
There are many more that don’t come to mind right now. Nothing major. No rocket science. Just doing smart things each day that all add up.
How would you describe yourself as a leader?
I’m very much still learning (and always will be, no doubt). I like giving people their space and area to focus on and letting them go to do their thing. As long as you’ve thought about what you want to do, let’s give it a shot and see what happens. Things don’t always have to work. Mistakes are acceptable, not punishable. Just don’t make the same one twice.
What do you love most about your job?
That we’re growing and I get to be a part of it all. It’s very challenging, I’m constantly being tested and realising I need to keep getting better and better. There’s no rest. But I get to look back and see the change and the growth & that’s a fuel I can’t get anywhere else.
Who is your retail hero and why?
It’d have to be marketing expert Mark Baartse. I started working with him last year sometime and I have learned a lot about a lot. He’s really helped pull me away from being someone who just looked at marketing for our brand as being a combination of Google + Facebook Ads. I always knew it wasn’t just that, but I used to spend a lot of my thinking around those ad platforms. He’s shown me there is so much more to running a successful e-commerce brand than just that.