With Australia Post already strained due to eCommerce volumes, Ragtrader asked Brand Collective and PAS Group owner Larry Kestelman about the ways the businesses will prepare for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping period.
What are your strategies for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales?
Our strategy goes back to listening to what the consumer wants.
If the consumer wants to shop on Black Friday, that's when they want to shop, we're not going to try to buck the trend and say 'we're not going to participate.'
You have to embrace these things.
We didn't create Black Friday, but if it's there and the consumer loves it and that's how they want to shop, then we'll fully embrace it and we'll do everything possible with it.
That means we have to be quick enough to be able to adapt things like, when we bring product in, how we run through our sales cycles, what actually happens with our deliveries.
If the sale components are spread out more through the year I think it's a good thing, not a bad thing.
It's never a great thing when all of your sales are concentrated in one or two periods.
So for us, the more of it that can happen and be smoothed out during the year, the better.
As long as we understand it, embrace it, plan for it, then we're all on board.
How are you navigating the logistical challenges at the moment?
We've had some great long-standing partners that in particular PAS has worked with.
But without a doubt, [the logistical challenges] is something that's really hurt the margins.
I think the cost of shipping has hit every business and it is a challenge that none of us can ignore.
It's an ongoing problem, and it's a problem that exists, both from logistics of timing and the delivery perspective; it's a real problem that we all face.
But what we can do is look at each of those elements and see which businesses handle them [better] and how, as well as the relationships and deals they have to leverage between one another.
We already know that there are some things that between the two businesses, one does better than the other.
So we'll obviously implement that across both businesses.
Read more about how Kestelman is going to grow Brand Collective in our upcoming September-October print edition.