"Bridging heritage and growth" - with Raine Peake of Crew Clothing

In this episode, Ian Jindal talks with Raine Peake, Group Digital Director at Crew Clothing Company, about how a portfolio of British heritage brands is adapting to a fast-changing digital and retail environment. The discussion covers what needs to be unlearned about discounting, channels, content and customer value, and what a more modern, test-and-learn approach looks like in practice.

Raine Peake is Group Digital Director at Crew Clothing Company, responsible for digital strategy, e-commerce trading, digital marketing and optimisation across Crew Clothing, Ben Sherman, Saltrock and Pringle of Scotland. Her experience spans Farfetch (through to IPO), New Look, Mint Velvet and Jigsaw, grounded in an early merchandising career in bricks-and-mortar retail.

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Chapters / Topics

00:00 – Introductions, Role and Brand Portfolio

Raine, who outlines her role as Group Digital Director and the brands in the portfolio:

• Crew Clothing: a heritage British coastal lifestyle brand with over 100 UK stores and an online presence.
• Saltrock: surfing heritage brand with around 70 stores, mainly in the South West.
• Ben Sherman: long-established British menswear brand rooted in shirt-making and youth culture.
• Pringle of Scotland: Scottish knitwear brand with over 200 years of history, known for cashmere and argyle.

Raine explains how each brand maintains its own identity while benefiting from shared learnings and capabilities at the group level.

02:40 – Career Path and Farfetch Influence

Raine talks through her route to Crew: New Look, Mint Velvet, Jigsaw and especially Farfetch through IPO, plus her beginnings in merchandising with pen-and-ledger retail. This mix of commercial and tech-led environment informs her approach to digital and marketing today, with a bias to experimentation and analytics.

04:45 – Heritage Brands in a Modern Age

The conversation turns to what it means to work with genuine heritage brands versus "fake heritage", and why heritage alone isn't enough. Crew and the group have shifted from assuming customers know their story to explicitly telling it: focusing on origins in Salcombe, coastal and sporting roots, and material and construction details of core products.

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Brand Storytelling and Authenticity (Approx. 09:10)

Raine describes how the portfolio has moved to much more explicit brand storytelling online. That includes:

• Highlighting core categories (men's half-zips, polos, women's knitwear) and explaining why their version is worth choosing.
• Using consistent, always-on brand-led content, on the basis that new customers are seeing it for the first time.
• Connecting digital communications with sponsorships (LTA, Henley, England Rugby's Red Roses) and Crew's coastal/sport positioning.

With Pringle of Scotland, the group is at an earlier stage, exploring how to retell a long heritage story and link Scottish manufacturing and historic prestige with contemporary relevance and accessibility.

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Testing and Channels

05:55 – Testing by Region: Meta, TikTok, YouTube

Raine explains splitting the UK into four regions with broadly similar population and digital revenue to test different mid- and upper-funnel strategies with Nest Commerce across Meta, TikTok and YouTube. All areas with additional top-of-funnel spend outperformed a control, validating the approach.

08:10 – Content Volume and "Greedy" Platforms

To support this, the team had to roughly double content output, from basic sales assets to influencer-led and brand storytelling videos. Raine notes that platforms are "greedy", and having more creative variants in play generally increases performance opportunities.

09:45 – YouTube and Connected TV Discovery

The tests showed YouTube delivering the clearest uplift, with statistically significant gains over other channels. A key insight was that their mainly 35+ audience overindexed on watching YouTube on Connected TV rather than on laptops or mobile devices, aligning with broader shifts in TV-screen video consumption and shoppable CTV.

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Managing Multiple Heritage Brands (Approx. 11:20–13:00)

Raine explains how the group keeps Crew, Saltrock, Ben Sherman and Pringle distinct:

• Separate teams and locations (e.g. Ben Sherman marketing in Kingston and product in Leeds; Saltrock centred in the South West surf community).
• Expectation that teams "live" the brand (Saltrock staff surf; Crew leans into coastal and sporting lifestyles).
• Avoiding visual and tonal "bleed" between brands while sharing what works operationally or strategically.

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Gamification and Operations (Approx. 17:00)

Raine draws on her time at Jigsaw to describe how to gamify ship-from-store fulfilment. Features include:

• Speed-to-fulfil metrics and leaderboards.
• Order acceptance/decline race dynamics.
• Clear timelines to match rising delivery expectations.

She emphasises that gamification must be paired with tangible rewards such as store bonuses; otherwise, it risks being perceived as added pressure rather than engagement.

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Promotions, Black Friday and "Fake Friday"

20:30–21:30 – "Fake Friday" and Black Friday Setup

Raine explains how "Fake Friday" (the Friday before Black Friday, when traffic spikes) acts as a natural live test. Crew leaned into this with lower-level discounts and archive sale emails, gaining insight into messaging and customer responsiveness ahead of the main event.

21:30 – Black Friday: Removing the Numbers

In Black Friday week, a complex mix of 30%/40% discounts underperformed due to heavy competition, noisy messaging, and customer confusion. The team then:

• Removed percentage figures from subject lines and selected ads.
• Switched to more verbal phrasing, such as "Best sale ever" and "half price" rather than "50% off".
• Built on earlier "no percentage" archive sale tests from Fake Friday.

This change improved engagement and delivered a strong Black Friday performance, illustrating that messaging clarity and distinctiveness can outperform marginally higher or more explicit discounts in a crowded market.

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Customer Value and Segmentation (Approx. 24:20–25:10)

Raine outlines a shift from pure monetary VIP segmentation towards frequency-based tiers. Key points:

• A customer spending £100 across four orders is treated as a higher priority than a single £100-order customer, because frequency is a better signal of engagement and upgrade potential.
• Segments such as "high-high" and "high-medium" are targeted with nuance, focusing on moving engaged customers upwards rather than relying heavily on discounting low-frequency buyers.
• VIPs are prioritised for early offers, but the team is careful not to repeat discounts on key items to avoid eroding perceived value and frustrating loyal customers.

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Stores as Growth and Brand Engines

27:10 – Stores, Omnichannel Customers and Media

With over 100 Crew stores and 70 Saltrock locations, physical retail is treated as the primary marketing channel. Raine notes:

• Customers who shop in both stores and online are markedly more valuable.
• Stores provide tactile experience and human interaction that digital alone cannot match.
• The group uses Meta and Google tools to bid directly for store traffic, backed by footfall counters and store-visit measurement.

29:20 – Coherent Brand Story in Physical Space

Raine links store locations (market towns, coastal regions) with Crew's heritage, and uses sponsorships—LTA, Henley, England Rugby's Red Roses—to reinforce an "English coastal countryside" territory rather than opportunistic partnerships.

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New Categories and Communities (Approx. 31:30)

The launch of Crew Sport is positioned around realistic, community-led activity (parkrun, yoga, "parkrun and a coffee", watching rugby) rather than elite performance. This shapes product design and marketing tone for a customer whose life is active but not defined by high-performance sport.

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TikTok and Multi-Generational Reach

32:30–33:20 – Ageing with the Customer

The conversation touches on how brands can age with their customers—from playing to watching rugby—and the need to stay relevant to multiple generations simultaneously.

33:20 – TikTok: Parents, Teens and Preppy Style

Raine then breaks down how TikTok became a major channel for Crew:

• Preppy styling trends align with Crew's existing look, making the brand feel current on the platform.
• The team works with creators chosen by the paid agency, including tattooed male influencers who would not traditionally be associated with the brand but deliver strong performance.
• TikTok consistently delivers a higher return on ad spend than other channels during peak periods.

This represents another unlearning: not writing off TikTok because of age or heritage assumptions, and trusting younger, platform-native team members to select appropriate creators.

35:10 – Trust, Risk and Testing

Raine reflects on the decision to test TikTok seriously, giving the paid team freedom and focusing on measured outcomes rather than preconceived notions. Her view: test widely, keep what works, and accept that some tests will fail without over-dramatising them.

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Replatforming and Future Focus (Approx. 37:20–38:20)

Raine looks ahead to the group-wide move to Shopify: Pringle and Saltrock are already live, with Crew and Ben Sherman to follow. The goals include:

• Standardising platforms across brands.
• Increasing speed of experimentation and on-site changes.
• Gaining operational efficiencies and reducing technical complexity for the digital teams.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ian Jindal

Founder of RetailX

Guest

Raine Peake

Group Digital Director, Crew Clothing

What is Marketing UnLearned?

Marketing UnLearned explores the challenges the leading-edge digital marketing poses to established and received wisdom.

All new initiatives, until proven, are subject to scrutiny and challenge: the ‘waddabouts’, the statements of inertia, the “why bother?”, the deprioritising questions. Within these challenges there is often a grain of truth, but in this series we’ll take the challenges head on and learn how the exemplars deliver persuasively - perhaps changing our thinking along the way.

In partnership with Epsilon our first series will focus on innovation in the areas of retail media, digital advertising, CRM, and personalisation. We’ll speak with 10 expert practitioners who have moved beyond the optimised and well-know digital marketing processes. More than a simple ‘always sunny at 30,000ft’ case study, we’ll put the challenges to our guests and hear how they were overcome, how their thinking developed and learn about the ‘new state of the art’. While we may UnLearn some pieces of accepted wisdom, we’ll replace them with new, effective learning. Everyone wins with Marketing UnLearned.

Ian Jindal (00:01.496)
hello and welcome back to the studio. What can I say? We're in mid conversation, but let's try and pull back and give ourselves a start. So we're today back with Marketing Unlearned. We're looking at the challenges that leading-ed digital marketing poses to established and received wisdom. So what maxims need to be revisited? What certainties are now open to challenge and

Of course, having unlearned something, we're hoping we'll get some tips on how to relearn the better, improved, more relevant approach. So maybe we should call it marketing relearned, but we'll find out at the end because with no pressure at all, in the studio today, we have a guest who's been with us many times before behind the mic, on stage, quoted by us, left, right and centre, but we haven't managed to catch up since her new role.

So with a mythical drum beat, it's my great pleasure to welcome to the studio Rain Peake of Crew Clothing. Rain, welcome.

Raine Peake (01:09.351)
Hi Ian, yeah thanks for having me on this rather damp Friday morning. Excited.

Ian Jindal (01:15.084)
Well, we all hope that it's dry in our listeners ear, of course, so we'll shield them from the rain. But tell our listener briefly about you and also about Crew Clothing, the brand and the group.

Raine Peake (01:33.287)
So I'm currently the Group Digital Director at Crew Clothing. we have Crew, which is our kind of mothership, which is a heritage British lifestyle brand. have over 100 stores.

the country and a website and then we also own Salt Rock which is more of a surfing heritage has 70 stores which always shocks everybody mostly based in the southwest so when you go on holiday I'm sure there's a story in those kind of you know Broughton, Croyde kind of areas. Ben Sherman the well I'm gonna say heritage again they're all repeating heritage quite a lot yeah.

Ian Jindal (02:16.682)
It is heritage. But then we're at the age where things we remember are now heritage. Yes.

Raine Peake (02:19.333)
Exactly, both the brand and I are Heritage. And Pringle, so the beautiful Scottish knitwear brand. So quite a diverse portfolio, loads to do, exciting being across all of those different brands.

Ian Jindal (02:36.27)
And just tell us about the route very quickly to get here so that our listener doesn't have to be checking out your LinkedIn profile as they listen and drive and God knows what else.

Raine Peake (02:44.677)
Ha ha!

Raine Peake (02:48.349)
I mean, I can always be so easily found on LinkedIn because I've got an unusual name. But prior to Crew, I was at New Look for a couple of years, which is great fun. Obviously New Look's in everybody's heart, such a well-loved British brand. Very similar remit, so looking after e-com trading, digital marketing, site optimization. I've had a couple of Shopify replatforms at Mint Velvet, optimizing at Jigsaw.

Ian Jindal (02:50.636)
Ha ha.

Raine Peake (03:18.353)
The thing that kind of makes me a bit different from sort of other marketeers is that I was at Farfetch'd through to IPO. So that was very much a company that was a tech company doing fashion. So very different ways of thinking. And back in the sort of early 1800s, I started off my career as a merchandiser before, you know, filling in in black and red pen in a big ledger, sales and stock and everything. So, but always in retail, predominantly in women's retail.

Ian Jindal (03:35.511)
Yeah.

Ian Jindal (03:41.774)
Hey.

Ian Jindal (03:45.891)
Great, well look, that sets us up for maybe our first unlearning, relearning thing, which is although the brands you mentioned are all famous, much loved, all lamented today, they weren't this reinvention.

of a heritage brand for a modern age. So, you know, I can remember doing stuff with Ben Sherman back in the noughties as they were moving online. You know, we've seen so many of these heritage brands now either get bought by like Stone Island, taken in by Montclair and, you know, up marketed if that's a verb. So a real focus on the DNA of a heritage brand. But how does that translate? So

Maybe you could just talk first about that. Is this a simple thing, Ian? Don't worry, it's just marketing, leave it to me. Or are there things that have to be questioned and relearned when you try and take these brands to a modern audience and modern channels?

Raine Peake (04:53.925)
I think everything's so fast changing at the moment. think everybody thinks they know where their customers are. They think they know how they shop. There's that adage of, why does the homepage look like this? And it's like, only like 10 between 10 and 20 percent of traffic lands on the homepage. So we need to give them an experience across the whole site from a digital point of view. But I think, you know, it's very much test and learn and looking at things differently and being quite pragmatic and thinking actually that didn't work.

that did work and going again and just being curious. think one of the main things that

we look for as a team is are all the team members curious and are we kind of looking at different ways of doing things and I think that's the most important thing. think if you kind of think we've always done it like this or the brand is always like that I think you're to kind of come a bit unstuck. We've done some, we have done some really great work in terms of looking at the country we work with NEST as our performance agency and so what we wanted to do was a lot of testing in July to September

Ian Jindal (05:46.99)
Yeah.

Raine Peake (05:59.921)
to make sure we'd learnt all of those lessons and any unfortunate lessons prior to peak and kind of really optimised. So we do have, as I said, over a hundred stores and they're always going to be your best and biggest and most fantastic marketing channel. So we split the country into four and then looked at different ways.

Ian Jindal (06:20.906)
What was that split? Obviously we're running out of nations.

Raine Peake (06:24.249)
Yeah it was it was it yeah I mean we are we over index in the southwest in terms of number of stores but it was kind of southwest the middle bit up up to kind of Yorkshire Scotland and kind of quite a long way down and then sort of Wales into the so it was it was a bit arbitrary this split because we were trying to make sure that we had the same number of population in each of them.

Ian Jindal (06:53.122)
right.

Raine Peake (06:53.331)
and roughly the same digital revenue split. it was a bit, yeah, if any kind of jog for it, which I am a jog, it did give me slight anxiety looking at it. I'm not sure this is appropriate.

Ian Jindal (07:04.216)
Ha ha ha.

Ian Jindal (07:09.134)
Listen, it's probably the, you've done a favor for the campaign for Greater Wales and sort Cornish freedom there. And so you've split the country and...

Raine Peake (07:13.907)
Very professional.

Yeah, wanted to test things that we didn't think necessarily were what we thought our customers heartland was. So we wanted to test.

tone of voice, mid and upper funnel, because we know that as a brand we've got a very strong brand identity with Crew. We've got a recognizable logo. We're known for certain things, which is obviously a great place to be in. But we wanted to look at different ways of spending our marketing money because we knew that if we kind of trawling the kind of slightly dirty bottom of funnel element, we'd run out of customers and we needed to sort of cast

Ian Jindal (08:00.27)
Mm-hmm.

Raine Peake (08:02.015)
the net and getting new customers. So in our slightly strange splitting of the country, we had a control group and then we over spent into matter. So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, which was relatively relatively new for us at that point and YouTube. So we hadn't really been optimizing to YouTube at all. And then we ran that test for

I want to say eight weeks it was quite a long test and we did different things within it as we kind of went along if things worked and didn't work we obviously switched on or lent into.

we did generate a lot more content as well. So we realised that we needed about double the amount of content that we had. So versions of different ways, influencer content, all of those kind of extra amounts of, extra amounts of sort of collateral, because all of those platforms are super greedy. And we did think, well, the more you've got out there, the easier it is, which as a rough rule of thumb is probably true.

Ian Jindal (08:50.126)
Mmm.

Ian Jindal (09:03.895)
Yes.

Ian Jindal (09:09.518)
And again, is this content, we're not talking about product page content. Is this brand storytelling or, oh, that's okay.

Raine Peake (09:13.139)
No, videos, yep, all of the above. So from things that are really sort of basic postcard sale now, live 50 % off, whatever, through to influencers talking about the product, videos, brand led content, always on brand led content. I am a massive believer in always on brand led content because we might be totally bored of it, but the customer isn't and especially if the customer doesn't know us.

Ian Jindal (09:40.088)
Hmm.

Raine Peake (09:42.355)
and kind of combinations of all of the above. So we ran the test and we found that all of the areas where we had spent more in were better, which is obviously a great place to be. It's good validation of top of funnel. But the area that was

Ian Jindal (09:53.9)
Right, that's a good validation of marketing there.

Raine Peake (10:01.255)
by a few percentage points, so statistically significant was YouTube. And that was something we hadn't really lent into before. But when we kind of thought about it, do sponsor sports. So we sponsor the LTA, the Red Raisers, which was so super exciting when they won.

and Henley. So I think it kind of leans into that sort YouTube element. We did find that our customer demographic is sort of 35 ish and up and down from there. But watching YouTube on a TV overindexed as to watching YouTube on a laptop. Because we think they were just like watching, you know.

watching YouTube as the telly, opposed to on the move and stuff like that. And it's so interesting where you can kind get down to those sort of into the weeds of those things.

Ian Jindal (10:47.647)
That's such an interesting modality, isn't it?

Ian Jindal (10:55.68)
So there's so many things there around obviously address ability, the experimentation, etc. But let me try and fold that back into this heritage brand discussion, because if I just transplanted you and dropped in another conversation, then other marketers will be saying, well, this makes sense. We do this for our brand or whatever. So to what extent is this different with a heritage brand versus,

Raine Peake (11:06.343)
Mm.

Ian Jindal (11:23.882)
a digital native brand or a startup or a more recent brand? Are there any elements there that you've had to either adapt or learn around, you know, what you're telling me is a more genuine connection rather than just fake heritage?

Raine Peake (11:41.243)
we... what an interesting term, fake heritage.

Ian Jindal (11:45.263)
Well, you know, everybody says, oh, we're heritage. think, yeah, but you've been bought 17 times. You're owned by a conglomerate. It's run by a marketing agency. It's a pastiche. So I'm not knocking that because sometimes that's what you want. But the question, I think, then, is if you are a genuine heritage brand, whatever that means, does it matter? Who cares? How do you behave differently? And do you make more or less money as a result?

Raine Peake (11:50.961)
Hmm.

Raine Peake (12:11.515)
We definitely started telling our brand story more.

So where we hadn't been particularly focused on our brand story, what made us different, our heritage, all of those things about explaining who we were, we focused much, much, much more on that. We are a very tradie business and we pride ourselves on being able to change and much to the anointing of the team for sure. But we are very nimble because we're sort of a medium sized business.

what we hadn't been doing a lot of was that real brand storytelling, who we are, who we're actually going after and kind of reiterating that point and reiterating that point with our sort of core and classic products. So always, you know, focusing on, you know, half zip for men.

Ian Jindal (12:53.72)
Hmm.

Raine Peake (13:05.075)
polo for men, knitwear for women, always focusing on those core categories and actually what those products were within them as well. we do have, I mean we're not the most cutting edge fashion brand, but we do have more fashionable styles within the range. But using the different types of product within different ad sets so that we were reiterating that point of actually, this is who we are, this is our DNA, this is how you know us. We've got some great creative that explains all of the ways

the garments are made and kind of really sort of draws the customer in as to why you should buy our particular half sip as opposed to anybody else's.

Ian Jindal (13:44.505)
Yeah, it's interesting, you know, just to jump brand slightly because the whole material side you have in Pringle, a very credible, you UK manufacturer, UK made.

brand that is not necessarily part of the whole sort of fast disposable fashion. It just is an authentic manufactured textile brand. How do you manage to keep all these things in your head in one go? So you've got, know, crew, the Henley visiting retired rower who still likes heavy cotton meets the surfer buying bleached woodwork trinket

from a seaside store the Ben Sherman person walk through the centre of Manchester on way to a football match and your

Granny's Pringle scarf that she's just given you. I mean my mind is like just exploding. I can't see the the sort of town centre that has those four stores on it next to each other. So from a marketing and brand perspective you must have so many brand stories and heritages in your head. How do you cope with with managing each of those?

Raine Peake (14:41.831)
Ha ha ha!

Raine Peake (15:04.883)
think because they're quite distinct they do really have their own identity I think that really really helps. The marketing teams within each of the brands so the Ben Schirmer marketing team is in Kingston office but the buying, merchandising and designing is in Leeds and the Wanton

Ian Jindal (15:24.642)
Yeah.

Raine Peake (15:26.983)
head office for Salt Rock is where similar split and their marketing focal and I think you need to have that distinction so that the black, the brands don't kind of bleed into each other to your point. So, so, you know, all of the Salt Rock team, they are all always surfing, always really living it. And you kind of like, actually it makes sense. And it kind of shows in the product, it shows in the kind of social, their social channels are fantastic. They kind of really get involved with the local community. They have events and all of those.

Ian Jindal (15:37.933)
Hmm.

Ian Jindal (15:49.816)
Yeah.

Raine Peake (15:56.909)
things and I think that kind of really means that embedding yourself within that region and within that kind of sort of heartland of all of those things makes such a difference. You started with Pringle and I think that's such an amazing beautiful brand you know we've just started our journey with them so we're just really looking at what we can do with them and how we can kind of

Ian Jindal (16:06.552)
Mm.

Raine Peake (16:17.011)
tell the story again. think, as you said, everybody's so fond of them. They had a royal charter, the Queen was an amazing Pringle wearer. So I think there's a lot of work that can be done with that and it's such an exciting...

opportunity I think to kind of protect that heritage and kind of work with it you know actually for a modern brand how do we, or in the modern time, do we keep that brand heritage, how do we tell the story of it and how do we actually remain profitable and make it accessible to more people. So I think that's a really really interesting one. We haven't really started working with Pringle other than kind of

Ian Jindal (16:33.784)
Yes.

Raine Peake (16:56.625)
We obviously are working with them, but we haven't started to tell those new stories yet. And I think that the whole team is super excited for that because I think they can all.

Ian Jindal (17:03.17)
Great. Well, I'll take that as an invitation to come and visit the manufacturing where we can arrange that. Good. OK, so we've touched on heritage. We're getting that. But let's go all modern and such because I was reading the other day about embedding gamification.

into your store activities. So we're jumping from the customer side to the back office, but we've gone from heritage to uber modern. Tell us a bit about that approach.

Raine Peake (17:34.663)
Hmm.

Raine Peake (17:39.655)
Ha ha ha.

Raine Peake (17:44.883)
I think I can give a really good example actually of this from Jigsaw which is where I was a couple of years ago and they use the One Stock platform so they pick from store and One Stock is

it has a single view of stock so you can kind of pick the digital orders from the store but they have a lot of gamification in that because as you can imagine you're in a store you've got you know a load of orders come through and you think why am I picking these I've got a you know I can sell these there's one in the changing room you know all of that kind of stuff but they have they have speed to actually fulfill the order gamification in terms of how many orders you pick it's a bit of a race to see how many orders you want to accept and decline and there's timelines within it because of you know we've all turned into

slight monsters in terms of if when you ship something it doesn't turn it up within two days you get kind of a bit annoyed but it was I know right exactly but it was just a really good example of actually the problem was that you're one of the stores to actually do something faster and and and kind of you know not not begrudgingly because I can totally understand if you're trying to serve a customer picking and orders a bit

Ian Jindal (18:36.686)
Two days? Who's waiting two days?

Raine Peake (18:53.699)
left field but the gamification of it just really enabled the teams to kind of really get behind it and made it a bit more fun. I mean I think retail is fun that is the whole point.

Ian Jindal (19:00.961)
So.

No, so I agree with that, but there's a little cynical and negative imp sitting on my shoulder that always rejects organised funds. If someone says, hey, would you like to work harder and faster? And we call it a game. In some companies that's, yeah, let's do it. This is gamifying. We love it. And in others, it's the brutal boot of oppression. So how do we make sure that

Raine Peake (19:29.713)
Ha ha ha.

Ian Jindal (19:33.582)
It is gamification and not just intensified working. It must be a culture thing there somewhere.

Raine Peake (19:39.239)
Yeah, I think this, I think this.

Definitely culture, definitely culture. And I think there has to be some reward as well. So there has to be some incentive. So if you do do all of those things within the gamification element, there has to be a reward of, you know, store bonus or store bonus when you hit all of these extra orders and stuff. It can't just be, as you said, a massive stick. Because, you know, that wouldn't be the most pleasant, I would say.

Ian Jindal (19:47.402)
Right.

Ian Jindal (20:03.904)
You

Ian Jindal (20:08.59)
And it's more than just a virtual label on my head in the metaverse, then it's it's tangible. Good. I mean, that's really interesting to see that we sort of gamify in the operation side as well as with the customer. But one of the big.

Raine Peake (20:12.755)
Yes, exactly, exactly.

Raine Peake (20:28.883)
Hmm.

Ian Jindal (20:31.788)
gamification activities we do with the customers around promotion. You know, we sort of trial and test promotion levels and so on. But you were telling me the other day that you've moved away from the.

sort of teasing here 10 % oh go and have 20 oh go and have 30 oh break my arm it's 40 you've gone away from that discount math so that's one of the other things that you mentioned and learning so tell us what um black friday taught you about that simplicity of approach rather than uh you know multi-variant testing discount levels

Raine Peake (21:01.458)
Hmm.

Raine Peake (21:06.099)
Yeah, so we had a fantastic fake Friday. the Friday, fake Friday. it's the Friday before Black Friday, because no one can remember when Black Friday is a Google term. It's a thing. Traffic goes massively up. So we had a really brilliant fake Friday.

Ian Jindal (21:12.194)
So, what's the the fake Friday?

I wish I'd thought of that.

really? Okay, fine.

Raine Peake (21:29.351)
and had some great results in that week before Black Friday. And then in the week of Black Friday, I think everybody kind of started to discount and it was very, very noisy in the market. We had different discount levels. we had, it's so confusing for customers, but we had like 30 % on certain things, 40 % on others. We were trying to make it super, super clear. Some elements better than others. And we changed our discount level and it just wasn't having the same level of cut through.

it was a great offer, was a really brilliant price on these things but just the click through and the of customer engagement just wasn't happening and the sales weren't coming through. So we did take the kind of drastic action to remove the number from the email lines and from some ads. So instead of saying, you know, our Black Friday offer was 50 up to 50 % off. So instead of saying 50 % off, because we'd kind of seen that actually when we were going up in numbers, people were just

like yeah, nah, whatever, know, whoever down the road has got it for 80 % or what have you. So we used different messaging, we used messaging like best sale ever, well that was the messaging best sale ever. We used the words half price and we took the percentage off and we'd done some testing on Fake Friday where we'd sent some.

Ian Jindal (22:31.438)
Hmm.

Ian Jindal (22:35.054)
You

Raine Peake (22:56.287)
old sale archive emails and hadn't put a percentage on there so we were we knew that there was kind of form in the fact that this would work but it was a bit brave when we were like right we're going to take all the numbers out and and hope well i mean strategy isn't hope is it but strategically

Ian Jindal (23:05.998)
Hmm.

Ian Jindal (23:11.566)
You mean strategically plan and expect.

Raine Peake (23:15.791)
strategically plan and you know Black Friday was really good for us. So I think it's kind of actually what is the customer what does the customer actually want? How are you talking to them to get them to click through? You know, they've probably got 30 other emails from all of their favorite not so favorite brands or you know, all of the ads and it's so noisy in that marketplace and everybody is just saying the same thing and a slightly different way with slightly different colors. So that's why we kind of decided to completely change it.

Ian Jindal (23:30.797)
Yeah.

Ian Jindal (23:41.121)
Yes.

Ian Jindal (23:45.632)
And that worked, I hope. I mean, it sounds like it did.

Raine Peake (23:45.677)
Yeah, it did work.

Yeah, I did. But it was to get the customer to actually click to see what the offer was or to stand out from that noise. You know, where you're promoting and not very many other people are, you are going to stand out. But Black Friday, as we now know, is so super competitive that you kind of need to look and do something different. You know, are you going to be me and and say, this is why we don't do Black Friday. These are the reasons why we'll make charitable donation. All of those things. Or are you going to be in the melee of discounting?

Ian Jindal (24:16.268)
Yeah. And with the Fake Friday, was that discount led or just people flexing their how to shop in advance?

Raine Peake (24:22.099)
So So there is a natural traffic spike in that Friday. We did then lean into that. So we had some lower discount offers on it and then we sent a

archive sailing mode because we knew that that would be something that we don't want to do during a sale time. We kind of pulse them at different times. So we've done lots of different testing in terms of so we're not hammering the base all at the same time because we have a lot of retained customers and that's kind of our, you know, our biggest area. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. And then they were in customer service.

Ian Jindal (24:49.133)
right.

Ian Jindal (25:01.014)
Yes, and they tend not to like seeing their favourite quarter zip at half price three weeks after they bought it.

Raine Peake (25:10.931)
rightly. So yes, we do segment and we do send different offers, we send the same offer but to different cohorts, so we always go VIP first. We have looked at a different way of our segmenting actually, so instead of just a monetary value we now segment by frequency. So instead of just, you know, Ian has spent £100, if John had spent £100 but over four orders we would actually count him as higher.

Ian Jindal (25:10.967)
Yeah.

Ian Jindal (25:41.025)
And I mean, there's a logic and an anti-logic. The logic is there are more habituated front of mind customer that you could elevate. But the flip side is that my one order has cost you one amount, whereas John has cost you four times the order processing costs. So he's marginally less profitable per hundred pounds. So even within that, you know, cost of service,

Raine Peake (26:03.826)
Mm.

Ian Jindal (26:10.914)
they still, you'd still prioritize the frequency.

Raine Peake (26:12.123)
Yeah, yeah we do because the... yeah.

because the frequency is just a much better metric for us. They're much more engaged. And we have, I mean, they're Natalie called high, high medium. You can tell the data analytics team named them. But yeah, but we know that we can move them across those bands more easily as well because they're more engaged. So we can move the high mediums into the high high much more easily than we can move a single order.

Ian Jindal (26:20.078)
Interesting.

Ian Jindal (26:26.529)
I'll be...

Yeah. Hi, hi.

Ian Jindal (26:35.245)
Yeah.

Ian Jindal (26:41.634)
Yeah.

Right, and the low lows, I take it, are just generally ignored rather than... Do they ever move to a sort of a low medium or... Yeah.

Raine Peake (26:48.817)
Well, I they have to move, you have to start somewhere. But we focus on moving the kind of, well, not easier, but they're kind of higher worth individuals.

Ian Jindal (27:02.85)
Yeah, interesting. Now, I'm just conscious of our time, so I do want to ask you bit about stores as well, because you obviously have the luxury of a...

Raine Peake (27:10.32)
Mm-hmm.

Ian Jindal (27:15.214)
surprisingly large store estate but also in different places as well. quite a lot of data to work on. But again one of the points that you've been working on is seeing the physical locations not just as fulfillment centers or legacy but very much as a starting place for acquisition and digital growth. So tell us a bit about that.

Raine Peake (27:41.424)
Absolutely.

Raine Peake (27:45.639)
So I mean, it's it's not rocket science that if you are a customer that stops in shops in store and shops online, you are more valuable. But it's that whole brand, you know, looping back to the beginning of the conversation, it's that brand experience and that kind of, you know, really getting across our heritage element. You know, we've got fantastic store teams. And when you go into a store, you have this, you know, great experience. You kind of get you kind of get all of those other elements of the brand that you just

you just can't get online you know you can touch and feel it I know that's you know stating the absolute obvious but it's just a much much better experience and I think where we have very much worked super hard and it's just not a thing at Crew is that we look at the whole customer and we work really closely with our store colleagues we work really closely to help

ensure that offers are consistent across the two, that the products are consistent. We have traffic driving elements into driving traffic into stores because if you think about it, know, don't want, I'm not that fussy where the customer shops as long as they shop somewhere. And you know, we've worked with a lot of digital marketing agencies and Google and Meta and we've driven store traffic via different

Ian Jindal (28:54.848)
Hmm

Raine Peake (29:08.647)
bidding mechanisms within both of those two things. So Meta is actually quite easy to to geolocate and drive store traffic and Google you can drive store traffic as long as you've got footfall counters you can kind of check and as long as you can identify. So it's just a really kind of you know why wouldn't you kind of work hand in hand with the stores.

Ian Jindal (29:22.999)
Mmm.

Ian Jindal (29:27.542)
And how do you then link the storytelling?

and the heritage of the brand to the physicality of the stores. So, you know, having grown up outside of London, you're aware that the web tends to be the glossiest, most glamorous, complete view of a brand. And then you wander into somewhere, I don't know, in Haverford West or Swansea or Croydon, where maybe it's like a B or C grade store fit at. So you're talking to them on the one hand,

Raine Peake (29:49.828)
Mm.

Ian Jindal (30:02.538)
the heritage, they have their cumulative experiences and then they have this variety of physical stores. How are you bridging that level of coherence and brand voice so it doesn't just look like disconnected marketing claims?

Raine Peake (30:19.185)
Yeah, I mean we don't

have particularly London centric stores. So our nearest is Chiswick probably. So we are much more of those kind of market towns throughout the country. And I think that allows us to kind of tell that heritage a lot more easily. you know, we are know, crew is from Salkham. So we've got such a broader state of stores in that kind of region. And I think people appreciate that and know that and I think it does help. think

Ian Jindal (30:28.728)
Mm-hmm.

Raine Peake (30:51.419)
you we are very clear as a brand what we stand for. You know, we've got really clear idea of what our customer is. You know, as we were saying before you pressed record, we sponsor, you know, definite sporting events and things. so there's a kind of it's not we don't just do it for fun. It's it's well, it is fun as well, obviously. I mean, I'm not to London. But.

Ian Jindal (31:07.608)
Yeah.

Ian Jindal (31:11.32)
But you're sort in the game. Sorry, that's a terrible accidental pun there.

Raine Peake (31:16.243)
But it all kind of leads back to the brand rather than it being a brand doing something that doesn't kind of sit with them. So everything that we do is kind of sort of within the realms of what the brand is about, within the realms of that kind of English coastal countryside. We've recently launched Sport.

Ian Jindal (31:25.39)
Yeah.

Raine Peake (31:38.577)
So we've launched a kind of sports range and you know the marketing for that did start out as you know parkrun and a coffee to appeal to our customers as opposed to you we know they're not going to be performance athletes well they could be performance athletes I could have done a disservice but you know the majority of our customers are you know it's yoga, pilates, know parkrun and a coffee and community so it's about those kind of communities.

Ian Jindal (31:47.191)
Yes.

Ian Jindal (31:50.734)
Hmm.

Ian Jindal (32:04.739)
Yeah.

Actively watching rugby. Active, very actively watching. Yes, yes. So maybe let's finish off then on one of the other surprising things for me was in a brand maybe like Crew, then even though we talk the talk.

Raine Peake (32:08.665)
Act very actively with me.

Ian Jindal (32:27.562)
you tend to age with your customers and they go from playing rugby to watching rugby to saying how good they used to be at rugby and they age and what was a 30 year old semi-active brand becomes 55 year olds watching sport. Now one of things that you mentioned when you're talking about TikTok for example is this idea that you're simultaneously reaching the dads

and maybe the kids via the same channel which is a really interesting approach to a new channel being used to bridge generations. So maybe let's finish off our time just working out what you've learnt and you've changed your mind about from those learnings.

Raine Peake (33:06.899)
Mm.

Raine Peake (33:18.387)
Yeah, for sure. So you wouldn't necessarily think TikTok would be one of our major marketing channels just from the nature of the brand. Yeah, which I totally get. think so we're, know, we've, you know, I'm going to say testing again, but we love a test. So where we've kind of lent into that on in TikTok, we've kind of found that.

Ian Jindal (33:23.2)
No, I wouldn't have, so... But I'm glad you said it, not me.

Raine Peake (33:42.447)
It is the kind of the parents and the teens, you know, we've got preppy, the preppy kind of styling is in our favour at the moment for sure. And that is what we are. But we've had some absolutely fantastic success on TikTok. So we run ads across TikTok and we also work with we work with creators that you wouldn't necessarily think are, you know, some of the typical core customers. You know, I had a finance director screenshotted this chap and was like,

Ian Jindal (33:52.065)
Right.

Raine Peake (34:12.391)
got tattoos. I was like, hmm, he has got a lot. But then when we checked, actually he was one of our best performing, best performing parades.

Ian Jindal (34:23.66)
Right, so your finance director's now just gone to get a few facial tattoos.

Raine Peake (34:26.803)
Can you imagine? So yeah, it's kind of like actually let's just...

lean into this and kind of do different and it's because we don't have a you know we're quite a fun brand we've got our sporting heritage and stuff it can appeal to those two those two generations it's not mortifying if your dad is wearing the same jumper as you um so so yeah so we've kind of we've gone wholeheartedly into it and when we were looking at the results for tiktok right through peak they have consistently um had a higher return spend than the other channels i mean i know it's

Ian Jindal (35:04.59)
interesting.

Raine Peake (35:04.913)
a less mature platform so you can kind of probably make more hay in it but it's it's definitely something that we've kind of pushed into more and more and more and we keep adding more

Ian Jindal (35:13.678)
But hang on, you've been, sorry, you've been a bit neutral there. And I nearly let you get away with it because you said, no, no, no. Oh yeah, we just tested it. Of course you test everything. I know that's how you roll, but there must've been a bit before you even decided it was there to test where either you had the idea or someone pitched you and said, hey, do you know what? Why don't you try and get multi-generational hits with a tattooed influencer on that there TikTok?

Raine Peake (35:23.271)
Mm.

Raine Peake (35:31.867)
of the Leap of Time.

Raine Peake (35:39.985)
Mmm.

Ian Jindal (35:43.82)
Just tell me about the moment where you went from, we don't do it, to, we're testing it.

Raine Peake (35:52.317)
I mean, as you know, Ian, I love a test. It's my favourite thing in the world. But I think we just kind of worked as a team. We worked with our agency. The influences that we use, the influences that we use from our PR agency are what you would expect. But then we did give carte blanche to our paid agency to use different people. just to work, obviously, if it hadn't have worked, we would have just pulled them. But we've got, you know, the paid team are brilliant.

Ian Jindal (35:54.958)
I'm

Ian Jindal (36:17.878)
Yes.

Raine Peake (36:22.261)
they've got relationships with some really great things and they're all in their early 20s or 20s so they have a very very different view of the world and I think you've just got to trust the team and let them go for it. I what's the worst that can happen? We're not saving lives.

Ian Jindal (36:35.534)
Great.

Well, maybe we are. see what happens in the next TikTok release about how your tattooed FD swings in and saves the day at the next Six Nations. Who knows? Yeah, well...

Raine Peake (36:48.595)
He would love to do that.

Ian Jindal (36:52.17)
Let's just take that as a pitch. I am available on all filming days between now and next summer. Ray, look, thank you so much. It's been absolutely fascinating to hear as ever both your passion for new ideas and then the testing and deployment. So it's, you know, you're consistent as ever and joyful in that. But listen, as we release you from the confines of the studio, I can hear that your notifications

Raine Peake (36:56.282)
Ha ha ha ha.

Raine Peake (37:07.005)
Mm-hmm.

Raine Peake (37:12.219)
Ha ha ha!

Ian Jindal (37:21.924)
has been buzzing. what is it that's waiting for you as we leave the studio that's really exciting?

Raine Peake (37:29.811)
So we are re-platforming, which I think will be super, super exciting. So Pringle and Slot Rock are already on Shopify. So we're...

Ian Jindal (37:35.95)
Wow.

Raine Peake (37:44.323)
working with them on that and then we're going to move the other two brands on Shopify. So later on today we've got a playback from an agency in terms of what that could look like and then we want to do that in the first half of next year. So yeah really really exciting and I think where we learn across the brands and when we work across the brands that gives us kind of really interesting way of working that you can kind of replicate.

and gain efficiencies across them. But yeah, that's main thing for next year that's going to be good fun.

Ian Jindal (38:11.341)
Wonderful.

Ian Jindal (38:15.998)
I do like a replatforming, has to be said. So look, I envy you that, but thank you for giving us an insight into some of the newer approaches, whether we're talking stores, heritage brands, balancing different credible brands in a portfolio, gamifying our stores, or even hitting the niche dad plus teenage son segment on TikTok.

Raine Peake (38:43.719)
Ha ha ha ha.

Ian Jindal (38:45.732)
pleasure chatting with you Rayne, thank you so much for joining us.

Raine Peake (38:48.819)
Thanks for having me, it's been great fun.