Why aren’t there more women in multichannel retail?

Within entrepreneurial ecommerce and multichannel businesses women are not in short supply. Think of Net-a-Porter’s Natalie Massenet, My-Wardrobe’s Sarah Curran, The White Company’s Chrissie Rucker; or further back to Lastminute.com’s Martha Lane Fox or eBay’s Meg Whitman.

But within high street retailers that have adopted ecommerce as a channel, this high proportion of females is not as evident. While there are a number of women running ecommerce in big retail businesses, given that it is such a young industry, shouldn’t there be more?

Women make up a tiny proportion of the board-level executives in British retailers, but one of the disciplines where they should be able to shine is ecommerce or multichannel retail.

Tesco’s £2bn dotcom business is run by a woman - Laura Wade-Gery - and she has just been able to announce a 14% rise in sales, and 26% rise in profits to £136m; proving firstly why she has the job and secondly that bricks-and-mortar retailers can make ecommerce profitable.

The female of the species

But this article was prompted by a male ecommerce director asking Retail Week why many more of his peers aren’t women, a question that Fat Face home shopping director Kristine Kirby says that she also often faces.

Kirby says: “I think it is an unusual skill set - most people tend to think it is a technical skill set and also statistical, which they associate with men.”

In fact she says that the multitasking abilities that women are famous for mean the role is just as applicable to them. “I think you have to be quite commercial, also technical, analytical and have merchandising skill sets,” she says, adding that there are also a lot of operational aspects to being in charge of ecommerce.

My-Wardrobe chief executive Sarah Curran says that in established retailers, ecommerce roles are still dominated by those from a retail background, perhaps one reason why most are still filled by men. She adds: “Hopefully it will change, as especially where retailers are targeting a female audience they need to know what she wants.”

John Lewis commercial director Andrea O’Donnell - who herself has had ecommerce added to her responsibilities earlier this year - agrees that those being given responsibility for ecommerce now have a lot of traditional retail experience. “Particularly in big corporates, those who move through the ranks tend to have 10 years or more experience in traditional roles, such as retail operations,” she says.

So for the moment, this means that the pool of men that ecommerce directors will be drawn from is inevitably bigger than the pool of women. As O’Donnell points out, there are a lot less women in senior positions in retail in general.

Buying and merchandising is one of the areas within retail where women have for a long time been seen in numbers and held prominent roles. But is this a route into an ecommerce role?

O’Donnell believes so. She says: “For people that come up through buying and merchandising, they are most interested in how customers spend their time and money - that is increasingly about a multichannel experience.”

She adds that the excitement about online is not just about commerce, but that you can get so much customer insight.

Kirby believes that there is another source of female ecommerce talent that has yet to be fully tapped. 10 years ago marketing departments were often in charge of a retailer’s website, but the model has moved on from there as they have become transactional and a more important sales channel. However, marketers still have many of the right skills to take ecommerce sites forward.

Kirby explains: “My master’s degree is in direct marketing. You understand things like the conversion triangle and you become more customer-centric.” She adds that marketing heads also tend to have an eye for usability.

She continues: “Women from the marketing side usually have some experience of working on a website, are usually quite good planners and can spin events such as Christmas and Easter. If you do marketing then you get statistics and you learn quite quickly to use analytics.”

And Curran points out it is important to have a mix of views when you are innovating around ecommerce, as there are no hard and fast rules. You will often be heading into the unknown. She gives an example of where she has really had to push for developments on the site that she felt would appeal to her female customers - and would create loyalty - but could not prove a return on investment before the development was put in place.

“When we launched My-TV, Andrew (My-Wardrobe’s chief operating officer and also her husband) really didn’t get it. But TV is one of those things that creates such stickiness,” she explains.

Kirby had her own marketing agency in the US, which she sold before starting her own retail web business. She missed the feeling of working as part of a team, so has gone on to jobs where she is leading ecommerce within a bigger business, heading up ecommerce at Lipsy and now Fat Face.

But a career ending up within a large retailer is not the route that all internet entrepreneurs would plan. Curran says: “My personal view is that what gets me excited is creating my own website and personal experience. Working for a big retailer is not the route I want to go down.”

Fashion brands and fashion retailers have been one of the cultivators of female ecommerce talent. However, Kirby says that there is no reason why they can’t transfer these skills into other types of retail businesses. “If you can sell fashion, you can sell anything. It is about understanding the customer’s needs and their journey. Fashion is a more competitive market in many ways,” she says.

Time to shine

At the same time as a new breed of female fashion executives could emerge, the ecommerce role is itself changing.

O’Donnell is one of the first to be given responsibility for bricks and clicks, but it is move that she expects more retailers to try and emulate.

“You will be working with a lot of legacy thinking on how business is done. You have to think that this 10% to 15% of sales is more important than competencies you have built up over the past 20 years.

“We are doing really well online… but even for us it is a big change in mindset and culture, one of the biggest transformational changes we have seen for quite some time.”

It matters little whether you are male or female if this is the challenge.

What is important is that you are able to manage change and motivate your organisation to move with you.

But once you get there, then Kirby believes that women are able to empathise with the complex shopping journeys their multichannel customers increasingly take. “A lot of our men’s product online is bought by women, and women are well placed to understand the shopping journey.”

Kirby concludes that the most important thing for women who want to get into the top roles in ecommerce to do is networking. She points out that as few will have a formal ecommerce education, then you need to go out and meet people, both to keep your skills and knowledge fresh, and also to create profile. “Just because you do a virtual job, doesn’t mean you need to be invisible,” she says.

And that really is true. There are plenty of women out there already working within ecommerce, or roles that could get them there, even if they don’t yet have the top job. But while their male peers are often high-profile externally, women need to make sure that they are visible too.