Growing a platform business model

21 May 2018 — 1 min read

Retail & Consumer Goods

Business Strategy

This fashion platform business is revolutionising the way people shop. They’ve enjoyed rapid growth and came to us for help in continuing this trajectory, and ensuring they don’t lose their innovative DNA as they transition into a major business.

Retail has been turned upside down in the last couple of years. At no other point has there been such a steep amount of change and many retailers are struggling to keep up. With the growth of the global tech scene, we have seen a huge amount of disruption and pressure being exerted by many new contenders. This fashion platform business is one of those contenders, and they are challenging the market in a very real way…

Why Elixirr?

Across our team, we have vast experience of launching young businesses (and we are one ourselves!), brought together with experience helping larger organisations create a stable platform from which to grow their businesses. This, coupled with our innovation work and our global startup ecosystem made us the perfect partner for this ambitious business as they knew we’d be able to marry lean, startup ways of working with balanced with the necessary corporate rigour, so they could keep innovation alive (and thriving) into the future.

We were in it together – their journey was our journey. Our goals were fully aligned.

01 Overview

In close collaboration with their teams, we helped them define their vision and approach to ensuring innovation remained of central and equal importance inside their business. This was in parallel to helping them create a world leading in-store proposition. Like us, they aren’t afraid to take a risk and put their money where their mouth is when it comes to investing in the next big things in retail. We guided this ideation and helped to make it happen.

02 Outcome

Helped to secure a major partnership deal. Clear direction on how to keep ahead of the competition by striking the right balance between keeping innovation pulsing strongly inside their DNA, and operating as an effectively run, large organisation.

03 Method

Strategy, innovation, organisation, design thinking, partnerships, visioning workshops, commercial model build and customer journey mapping.

The challenge

The challenge they posed to us spanned two areas:

Create and launch innovative new business models and partnerships
Create an environment and structure that would support and develop the business on their innovation and growth trajectory.

We worked with multiple functions across their business, supporting wider innovation and strategic objectives at the same time as building a commercial proposal to help scale the business.

The approach

Initially, we supported their team to create brand new, and world-class in-store experiences. This involved drilling into the products they were building and helping them to create a truly engaging proposition for their customers. This initiative helped secure a partnership with one of the major fashion houses.

From here we defined the innovation strategy, framework and operating model which brought together outside-in and internally generated ideas through to incubation, acceleration and scaling for growth.

We ran workshops across 3 geographies for 120 people in all functions to define the future end-to-end customer vision. The findings were synthesised and prepared into a compelling user journey for key customer groups. We then held a workshop with the CEO to finalise the product journey vision.

We also supported the in-store team to create a framework for internal and external audiences. It will be used as a training document and template for engaging potential future customers.

The value delivered

Together, we increased their scalability faster than the market could have predicted. They are able to remain true to their vision of being a revolutionary company by powerfully combining an effective innovation approach with corporate rigour. You can believe us when we say, this is a fashion platform business that is going places…

We supported a number of projects working across store of the future, innovation and product teams to help shape, scale and stress test various aspects of their business. We brought professionalism, rigour and a strong understanding of fashion, technology and innovation. Our entrepreneurial way of working fully resonated with their culture, and our team worked seamlessly as an extension of theirs to really make change happen, at pace.

Karina van den Oever – Partner, Elixirr