�s online shopping site for the Apac region – it was at a point when Australian retailers were transitioning from custom-built websites to enterprise-level platforms. Back then, the job was a lot more manual, but in some ways, it was also a lot more manageable. “I really miss the good old days of some of that technology. If I could have Magento back in its original format, I would in a heartbeat,” she told Inside Retail. “It was much easier and quicker to update a conflict. You didn’t need developers, you didn’t need data scientists. You basically had everything you needed to run the website between that, your social media channels, email platform and Google Analytics.” Speaking at a conference recently, Nicola jokingly referred to herself as an “e-commerce Boomer”. She was at Quiksilver when the brand made its first sale to SurfStitch – for $1 million – and in a later role at Kathmandu, she was part of Australia’s inaugural Click Frenzy in 2012. “We were seeing all these complaints on Twitter of websites going down left, right and centre, and we were still up, so we were live tweeting, ‘We’re up,’ ” she recalled. “We just had a phenomenal night and we made the news for being one of the top performers.” Following stints at Quiksilver and Kathmandu, which she took from $3.5 million to $14 million in online sales in two years, Nicola moved to Forever New. “We launched the New Zealand website, launched all of the digital marketing channels and had 100 per cent year-on-year growth over the two years that I was there,” she said. “That was really boom time and every channel you could turn on and just run with.” She was earning a reputation for successful website replatformings, but to reach the next rung in the career ladder, she had to go outside the retail industry and join Jetstar. “I pitched in the interview process that they needed to be less like an airline and more like a retailer,” she said. “We used to sell 20-odd products, so we broke all of those products up into components and created a full personalisation journey all the way through to the day that you actually flew. We decided which was the best place to offer you the right product, depending on your city pair [departure and arrival locations], how many people you were traveling with, how many days you were going, what other people like you had done. We also did this through the chatbot, through the call centre, through the devices at the airport…It was so well stitched together.” Scale and structure After Jetstar, Nicola returned to retail, landing senior e-commerce and omnichannel leadership roles, first at Smiggle, then at Myer, where she was responsible for digital strategy and connecting the end-to-end customer experience across all channels. Leading a team of 75 people, and tapping into the business transformation skills she had acquired at Jetstar, she grew the company’s online sales from about $250 million when she started, in 2019, to over $800 million by the time she left in 2022, to pursue her MBA at Oxford University. Nicola had dreamed of getting her MBA for many years, but when she got to Oxford, she realised that she already knew much of what was covered in the program. “What it gave me more than anything was the tools to be able to communicate those things in a way that a CFO or a board would better understand,” she said. While she was studying, Nicola began working nearly full-time for Adore Beauty, but thanks to a flexible working policy and strict timetable, she was able to balance both commitments. “When I was in the UK, I would get up, do two to three hours of work, go for a run, have a shower, go to university and keep on top of my email,” she said. “I actually don’t like that much structure, but I knew that I needed it to survive.” She had been hired at Adore as a transformation consultant and later became its chief experience officer. She introduced agile processes and design thinking workshops, ensured the team was all working in the same direction and developed their skills; for instance, how to run an enterprise-level request for proposal (RFP) process. “It’s not overly sexy, but when you go back to basics and lay them in over and over again, you actually really start to see the rewards, and specifically, Adore’s ability to turn around from a profit perspective during that time was really encouraging,” she said. Nicola finished up at Adore in December 2024 and is currently consulting while she seeks her next role.