Before a brand partner meets Abigail or Snow, however, their store must go from concept to transactional. And there are more than 1000 individual steps to make that a reality.
Enter divisional leaders Jen Rowan, Justice Hampton, Charles Lavoie, and their respective teams.
These subject matter experts are geographically spread out across the globe, working alongside the Engagements managers and coordinators, with almost all brands in the WPIC portfolio, to assist with creative, merchandising and project management.
After knowing and collaborating with the Cooke brothers for several years in China, Charles Lavoie joined WPIC to build out and oversee the new Creative Labs division. Having lived in Beijing for over a decade, he led brand strategy in-market for organizations like Daimler, Nestle, Bauer, and many more.
“We’ve wanted to have Charles join WPIC for many years now, and we’re thrilled he’s leading our creative endeavors,” explains Joseph. “This guy is a star who builds brands in China like no one else. He understands the different consumers so well and does a phenomenal job translating the essence of foreign brands to the Chinese market.”
In the onboarding stage, Charles works with brands to develop a creative strategy for their market-entry program.
Leaning on human psychology, demographic insights, pop-culture trends, and other key elements that tap into consumer behavior in market, Charles and his creative team – based across multiple offices in China – identify a brand’s target audience, and then develop localized design assets that can be leveraged to appeal to that audience – both through in-platform and out-of-platform channels.
“Creativity has become brass tacks in China,” Charles explains. “You need creative campaigns that attract consumer attention and sell them on both product benefits and a brand identity. It’s the case around the world and China is no exception.”
“Another very real challenge is figuring out the appropriate amount to localize your content. Whenever we work with a brand, there is always a fascinating balance that we have to strike between the organization’s natural and authentic creative and their need to localize content for the APAC markets – beyond just translation.”
His counterpart is new Director of Merchandising Justice Hampton, who joined WPIC having worked for 15 years in product merchandising for Ralph Lauren, Coach, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Lululemon.
Working closely with WPIC’s data sciences team in Beijing, Justice’s chief responsibility in the onboarding phase is to advise brand partners on which SKUs they should bring to market, at what price, and at what inventory volume. Then, he leverages that data and his experience to build out “the science of sell-through”.
“Merchandising strategy is essential, so we do that in-house because we have a deep understanding of its value,” Justice explains. “It’s no longer the case that brands can simply flood the market with SKUs at home market prices and expect to make profit.”
“Today across APAC, it’s much more complicated. We lean on data to get some powerful insights into consumer behavior in the market. Then, once we have those insights, we develop formulations on how they can maximize turnover and drive growth with their program.”
