Patrice Jean Louis Louvet - Ralph Lauren Corp.
Management
Good morning, Paul. Hey, welcome. Welcome to the group. So we're actually pleased with our progress on digital commerce this quarter, both in North America and actually also internationally, but let me touch on the key drivers for the North America progress. It's really three factors for us: one, better brand building; two, an enhanced consumer experience; and then, three, continued work on quality of sales. So maybe just to give you some flavor, some of the things we drove across each of these factors. On the brand building front, we leveraged the 50th Anniversary Fashion Show with what we called an immersive website experience. We streamed the show live. We told richer and deeper stories, and we're going to continue to do that on product. We integrated our social feeds, and we launched what we've called a dynamic 50th storytelling section on the site, so much more elevated storytelling, much more elevated photography, much more interesting content. On the consumer experience front, we drove a number of changes, and we know we have significant progress to make here. So just to give you few examples of increased functionality in this past quarter; faster site loading time on mobile. Our loading time improved by 25% to 30% over the past quarter, and we know every second is millions of dollars. Product suggestions, so we introduced a May We Suggest section. Actually, we reintroduced a May We Suggest section that we had many years back and that we brought back. We've provided enhanced product detail pages. We launched favorites, and we also launched the waitlist functionality. We are now delivering more elevated packaging on our luxury items, and then we accelerated our standard shipping timings. So those are just a few of the changes we've driven. And obviously, making sure our consumers have an awesome experience on the site is critical for us. Then the third element is we continued to work on quality of sales, driving AURs and reducing our discounting over time. In terms of innings and Jane is our baseball expert on this team, listen, in terms of innings, I think, Paul, at this stage, we're really in the very early stages of the game. We actually see many more opportunities moving forward. We're planning continued growth now in North America digital commerce in the back half of the year. So we're pleased with the plus 9% we delivered this quarter and expect to continue to grow moving forward. Then longer term, our biggest opportunities are really in building the omnichannel functionality of our digital commerce operations, so better connecting our retail experiences to where the consumer wants us to show up, better connecting it to our social commerce, and so on.