Selling direct to the consumer is the future of retail, says Elizabeth Ragone, senior vice president of Lenox Direct.
Lenox, which is privately owned, launched in 1889 as a maker of fine china and home decor. Between its website, telemarketing and catalog, about 15% of Lenox’s sales are direct-to-consumer with Lenox.com making up 73% of those sales, Ragone told Internet Retailer at the National Retail Federation show in New York City this month. Wholesale sales to retailers such as Macy’s Inc. and Bloomingdale’s make up most of Lenox’s business.
Lenox has had an e-commerce site since 1999, however it’s platform was a “homegrown legacy environment” that was outdated and cumbersome to maintain, said Ravi Kurumety, chief information officer. The company knew it needed to enhance its website to better communicate its brand to shoppers, Ragone said.
“We are in charge of our message, our voice and brand image, instead of relying on sales people in a different store, as we know there are fewer of them,” she said.
Lenox switched to Oracle Corp.’s Commerce Cloud e-commerce platform in October 2016 for several reasons, Kurumety and Ragone said. For example, previously, the retailer could not run A/B tests to see which website features or layouts boosted conversion. Now, this type of testing functionality is built in with the Oracle platform and it can quickly set up tests, Ragone said.
Since Lenox.com replatformed, the retailer’s direct-to-consumer sales increased by double-digit percentages during both the 2016 and 2017 holiday seasons, Kurumety said without revealing exact figures.
Lenox’s direct-to-consumer business exceeded its sales targets for the holiday season, Ragone said. Direct-to-consumer sales are largely from Lenox.com and the holiday period is Nov. 1-Dec. 31.
With the new site, Lenox reduced its in-house development team to just three employees because it only has to manage the consumer-facing elements of the site. The previous site required a larger team because the retailer had to use custom coding, Ragone said. She did not say how big the previous team was.
“[The new website] allowed us to focus on e-commerce and not worry about some of the problems we had before,” Ragone said. For example, functions of its previous website would break, which would then cause a flood of calls to its customer service center. Now, functions don’t break as frequently, she said.
The retailer can also run promotions on a category level, which previously would take weeks or a month to configure, Kurumety said.
Another benefit for the Lenox team in going with a large e-commerce platform was having a built-in content delivery network to cache Lenox.com. With a content delivery network, when a consumer accesses the website, the browser will ping a nearby server which will serve the site, which may already be cached. This allows the website to load and run faster. Oracle uses the Akamai Technologies Inc. content delivery network.
On average, 50% of Lenox.com’s traffic uses the content delivery network, which means that half of the traffic does not have to go through the Oracle Commerce Cloud server, said Kurumety. During December, Lenox.com had nearly 490,000 website visits, according to web measurement firm SimilarWeb Ltd.
The platform switch took about six months to complete, Kuremety said. The retailer reviewed more than a dozen vendors and chose Oracle because it had worked with the vendor before and it was confident they could complete the project in time for the holiday season, he said.
While there are some limitations with templates, such as image sizing or where the retailer can embed video, overall the replatforming was positive for the retailer, Ragone said.
The next step for the Lenox brand is to create a marketing strategy to target younger shoppers. For example, Lenox is traditionally known as a retailer of fine china, however it also sells casual dishware. The retailer is trying to figure out how to talk to both its traditional shoppers and target new shoppers with less formal dinnerware.
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