ustomers across all touchpoints. With one in seven Australians shopping online every day, Peter Jackson saw the need to improve its digital offering. After investing in the digital side of the business, with the support of Shopline, Peter Jackson increased its online sales revenue by 50 per cent in the first week and average order value by 28 per cent. The brand is now able to offer customers a true omnichannel experience, including integrated stock lookups, click-and-collect and the ability to access customer information at a store level. Jackson told Inside Retail, “Typically, our category doesn’t perform that well online, but with all that added integration with our store network, the results speak for themselves.” While it was important to drive volume through e-commerce, it was important to improve the overall customer experience. “Prior to this, we didn’t have the structure right, so it [the previous customer experience] really held us back in what we did,” he said. In contrast, he said, the current e-commerce site is “like one of our premium flagships and something we’re really proud of”.  “When you land on site, the speed and branding elements, we have a great focus on our branding in the business across everything that we do,” he said. “All the flows and the interactions, usability and the UX and UI, really supports that branding focus.” The brand offers international shipping for online orders but does not plan to invest in brick-and-mortar retail overseas as part of the next phase of the growth strategy. “We’re not willing to give up on sales but it’s just understanding the logistics and the processes behind that a lot more. Data will shape how we fill out the shops moving forward. So, understanding key sizes, locations, the right stock at the right place at the right time, will help shape our store experience,” Jackson said. “The big focus is the refurbishment of stores and the increased focus on customer experience. Largely, it’s about scaling our internal operation,” he added. Coming back to the customer Beyond the digital relaunch, Peter Jackson is planning to renovate its existing stores and take a new approach to store design to make shopping in-store a more boutique and curated experience. This is a key part of the brand’s expansion, but it doesn’t mean stores will carry less stock.  With 14 people currently working from the head office, Jackson emphasised that the focus for 2024 has shifted to “build out our teams and internal operation”. The new head office boasts 1000 square metres of real estate in Abbotsford, almost triple the size of the previous 350-square-metre office, and provides a hint to where the business is headed. “We needed the footprint and the structure right first and then we can start building our internal teams,” Jackson said. “We’ve sort of done it in reverse to what other retailers would do.” Going national Peter Jackson founded the eponymous brand in 1948. It was initially a barber shop on Little Bourke Street in Melbourne and naturally evolved into menswear in the 50s and 60s.  “It was really the place to get your hair cut in Melbourne in the 50s and 60s. And then Peter had a flair for menswear,” Jackson, who is the son of the founder’s nephew, said. In 2013, the business expanded nationally when it opened its first store outside of Victoria in Adelaide’s Rundle Place.  Nick Jackson entered the business in 2012 after a career as a buying officer for Myer and territory manager at Cambridge Clothing Company. At the time the brand had 10 stores in Victoria.  “We’re very hands-on with the business [and] felt that Adelaide was the most obvious market to test the national expansion, so I moved to Adelaide,” he said. Since going national, the brand has opened 12 to 15 stores a year, all whilst remaining a privately owned, profitable business. Jackson describes his father Paul Jackson as running all of the financials and operational aspects of the business up until 1pm every day before delivering stock to the stores, which gave him an insight “and understanding to what’s actually happening in the business. It is probably one of our secrets,” he said. “The hard thing about going national was that we couldn’t do that regularly,” he added. “We were very hesitant to go to Sydney. We felt that was the sort of thing that could put the business at risk.” Instead, the business opened four stores in Adelaide due to the fact that it had an on-the-ground presence there and it shared a similar climate with Victoria. “There’s a number of reasons, but that was a decision that we made and opened the four stores. We’ve still got the four stores and it’s a really good market for us in Adelaide,” Jackson said. “We were quite aggressive with their rollouts because we were very intent on having scale and predominantly because we’re an active marketing business. So, we see value in our marketing efforts through that scale. Once we identify a market we really aggressively open stores in that market,” he added. In November last year, Peter Jackson expanded into Western Australia and now has nine retail stores in the state.  Whilst international expansion is not on the horizon Jackson hinted that Japan would be an obvious market that the brand would potentially entertain the prospect of.