Glue Store head of marketing and brand Charles Moore discusses the recent rollout of the Future Choice program.
What were the driving factors for launching Future Choice?
We spend a lot of time listening to the feedback from our customers and from our store staff because they are literally the best voice of our customer that we have - short of going in and speaking to the customers one on one.
In communicating and collaborating with all the store managers, there was one clear message which has been coming through for years: everybody wants to be more conscious around the choices that they are making but there's a lack of clarity and visibility of the choices that they have while shopping, especially in an in-store environment.
Online it's a lot easier, you can tag up products and you can see it visually, but there's a gap in the market for being able to actually address that kind of visibility and giving people that clarity in a store environment.
We actively invest in brands that have considered approaches to their ranges but I guess what the driving factor was that we hadn't found the right platform to communicate it.
So, Future Choice aims to do it and it's been a long time coming for Glue.
It is something that has been stirring under Glue for a long time and the whole team has been passionate about conscious choices for so many years.
We're not the first to the party and we hopefully won't be the last to the party.
The program is based around five pillars of sustainability, how did you come up with these?
(Thoughtful Threads, Recycled Materials, Not BAAd, Australian Owned and Our Customer Experience)
We started with what we know best, which is our product.
So from there it became really clear that there were three pillars that were related to products, but we felt as though we could combine things in an organic sense and it fit in together.
So the first one was Thoughtful Threads which is all of the considered natural fibres such as BCI cotton, organic cotton, linen or FSC certified.
Recycled Fabrics is the second pillar that we've got and then Animal Friendly.
There's an element there of similarity through all of our partners and what we've seen in the industry [that helped us determine those pillars].
But then also we asked, 'what are the things that our store teams, our buyers and our marketing team look for when we go into a store shopping?'
We're all looking for a product but what do we actually want to educate our customer on and help them get clarity on?
So that's where we started off with the products.
Then obviously over the last 12 months of COVID there's been a big shift to our customers increasingly wanting to support local.
Glue is an Australian-owned company for 20 years now and we wanted to make a point of educating our customer on our local brands that support BCI Cotton and organic, so it's added on an extra layer to what we could do.
We can hold up the fact that there are some heavy hitting Australian brands that are pulling off some amazing production techniques alongside the big-hitting international brands.
After we had a look at all of those pillars we felt that there was a real opportunity for us to look at our own customer experience, not only online but in-store too where we're actually connecting with those customers.
Not only how we can communicate and get out the visibility over these choices but what should we be doing to change our processes?
We're at the start of it with all the Future Choice window posters and Future Choice clothes hangers in-store made out of recycled PET plastic.
The inspiration behind the window posters and the store hangers was that we were saying, 'we can't launch a Future Choice campaign with something disposable, it has to be reusable.'
All of the assets that we used, the fabrics that we used for the photoshoot even, will continue to get reused throughout the year and for longer I hope.
We've also committed to phasing out recycled plastic bags and reducing our visual merchandising printing and waste by 50%.
I think after we get our internal processes down and more solidified in what else we can do, we definitely want to start looking at a more positive impact that we can make on communities at a local level.