Newell Rubbermaid Inc.’s vice president of global e-commerce says he has essentially been handed a blank check to grow the company’s e-commerce presence.
“The limit is going to be identifying where we can go,” Jeremy Liebowitz says. “There really isn’t a limit to how much we will invest to grow. The idea of this new division is that while we do have our own budget, we are there to identify new opportunities for growth in e-commerce.”
His team will be getting some major reinforcements to help spur that growth. Newell Rubbermaid is opening a global e-commerce hub in New York City early next year and adding more than 30 new members to its e-commerce staff, more than doubling the size of their existing team.
Liebowitz’s primary goal is simple: drive sales of Newell Rubbermaid products, regardless of whether consumers are buying them through the company’s web site or through retailers that carry the brand’s products. He’s hoping to do that by bringing the store experience into customers’ homes via the web.
“If you walk into a store and you see a Sharpie display, there’s often an area where people scribble, they can look at the tip of the pen. We want to bring that online by utilizing better close-up imagery. We may even show short video clips,” he says.
You can buy Newell Rubbermaid products directly through the company’s brand’s websites. But while some consumer brand manufacturers are focused on reaching customers directly these days, Liebowitz says Newell Rubbermaid’s e-commerce focus is going to be more on selling retailers’ web sites rather than through its own.
“I never want to cut out the retail partners,” he says. “Consumers are going to shop where they want to shop. If they want to go to one of our web sites and purchase Rubbermaid products, we’ll hope to create a great shopping experience with our brands, just as we want to create a great shopping experience for our brands on our retailers’ sites.”
The includes in its definition of e-commerce, any purchase made via the Internet, regardless of whether the shopper is using a computer, smartphone or laptop.
“When we say e-commerce we look at it as anything that’s not sold in a physical retail store,” Liebowitz says. “What I want from e-commerce is to create a great digital shopping experience for potential consumers. From there, if they choose to use their mobile phone, add it to a wish list there, pick it up in the store, as long as they choose our brands, that’s a win.”
So why did it take so long for a company that has been in business as long as Newell Rubbermaid has to make this kind of investment? Liebowitz, who was hired away from consumer brands manufacturer Jarden Consumer Solutions a little more than a year ago, credits company management for adapting to the changing times.
According to its most recent earnings report, the company has seen slight sales growth over the past year, up 3.1% to $1.521 billion from $1.475 billion during the same period last year. Liebowitz says it’s difficult to say what kind of an impact e-commerce had on the company’s bottom line, and the company is hoping to better understand that.
“It’s been a Herculean effort to pull in and understand what the total percentage of sales is online,” he says. “We are hoping now that with a growing analytics team that we’ll be able to go into the e-commerce partners within our retailers and unlock some of that information that may be there that they can help feed to us. Right now the information we get back is much more on the corporate omnichannel level, and we haven’t been able to separate out each retailer’s e-commerce from store sales.”
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