Angela Ahrendts, former Burberry CEO, was recently named as Apple's senior vice president of retail. Ahrendts spoke to Fast Company about the future of retail and discussed the challenges before taking her new role.
"[The challenge] is getting communities and getting companies to truly keep pace with every single individual because this" -- she waved her iPhone -- "is enabling them," she said in the Fast Company interview. "If you want to keep the next generation and if you want them to be united, you have to see this is how they live. You have to blow up all your existing policies--everything!--and rebuild them around this."
Fast Company included excerpts from an interview all about her approach to retail and having both the digital retail component and the brick-and-mortor, and how each player must understand the facets of each.
"In 2012, Ahrendts shook up the traditional, often-siloed nature of Burberry's retail stores. No longer would a store manager in Detroit only focus on Detroit in-store sales, for example, nor was a digital sales manager there allowed to ignore sales at brick-and-mortar shops," the Fast Company author wrote. "The disparate elements needed to speak to each other.
“Traditionally, wholesale is wholesale. Digital people are incentivized to drive digital. And store managers are interested in the store. We blew that all up," Ahrendts said in the interview. "I said, No, no, no, store manager in Detroit: You’re responsible for digital too. You’re telling me nobody in Detroit is shopping online? Wrong!"