ievement of his career. For Matthew Horn, the hardest part of navigating the bear market in 2024 was not hitting targets or managing the intense pressure on unit economics, as some people might assume. “I think the real challenge was morale,” the group general manager of customer and digital at Country Road Group told Inside Retail. Country Road Group owns the omnichannel fashion and accessories brands Country Road, Witchery, Politix, Mimco and Trenery. “Even for the most seasoned retailer, to read those weekly or daily reports and be greeted with a sea of red could be demoralising. But what I really worried about was the impact on the broader team. Having the energy to go the extra mile – it mattered more than ever.” Last year, Horn spent a lot of time thinking about his own energy and made a conscious decision to shift his interactions with team members from being task-oriented to more people-oriented. “I tried to ask myself not, ‘What do I need from this person in this conversation’, or, ‘What do we need to get done?’ But rather, ‘How do I want this person to feel by the end of that conversation?’” Horn explained. He also focused on his wellbeing because, as he said, “When you feel like the best version of yourself, then you can be well-positioned to bring out the best version of others and you can lift people’s spirits in a really authentic way.” Embedding a growth mindset At the same time, of course, Horn was still looking to grow Country Road Group’s digital business. “Even in times of economic decline, there is growth to be had,” he said. It just requires a scrappier approach built around small wins and experimentation, rather than marquee initiatives and investment. For example, his team re-designed Country Road’s product description page, leading to a 1.5 per cent increase in the average order value, 2.5 per cent increase in the conversion rate and 5 per cent increase in revenue. “It looks like an aesthetic refresh, but it was actually a comprehensive data-led redesign driven forward by experimentation,” he said. “We know the uplift on the successful variation was in the millions.” Another project involved testing the ideal day to send a customer a message about their complimentary birthday rewards: four, seven or 17 days before their birthday. “Sometimes it’s difficult to get the team energised about this stuff, but that test had a multimillion-dollar impact in terms of the successful variant. We changed the CRM journey design based on that,” he said. These initiatives speak to the cultural values Horn has embedded at Country Road Group based on his previous experiences working for high-growth companies like Uber and The Iconic. He credits three principles in particular for the team’s success last year: focusing on “input metrics”, or metrics that the team can fully or partially influence; having a robust culture of experimentation and “giving it a go’; and measuring everything. “The team is constantly thinking about the impact they’re having individually, as small or as big as it might be, and tailoring their priorities appropriately to maximise that,” he said. Nothing to lose Beyond the CX optimisations, Horn’s proudest accomplishment in 2024 was leading the reorganisation of his team as part of a wider transformation at Country Road Group. “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s perhaps the single most significant thing I will have done in this chapter of my career,” he said. Some might be surprised to hear this, given the tough year the company had. But in some ways, this made the case for change even easier. “When it came to my team, I really took the mandate of genuine transformation that our CEO gave us and ran with it,” Horn said. Rather than organising each functional area around expertise or platform, the digital team is now organised around customer outcomes and different parts of the path to purchase. “It’s a big shift and in areas like digital marketing, it’s genuinely novel. Only a couple of pureplays locally are operating in a similar way,” he said. In addition to better positioning Country Road Group to chase its strategic goals in e-commerce and digital, Horn believes the transformation will give individual team members greater ownership over their portion of the customer lifecycle or path to purchase. “Ownership can be daunting, but it’s also the backbone of job satisfaction, and that’s what matters most, a team that feels engaged and empowered,” he said. While it’s still early days, he said, he can sense a new energy in the building. Landing the change is his top priority for the year ahead. Further reading: Country Road Group’s Matthew Horn on the “secret sauce” of great organisations