As the holy month of Ramadan approaches, e-commerce platforms across the region are gearing up for an active month of online shopping with people going out for iftars and preparing for Eid.
Yoox Net-A-Porter is no exception with Nisreen Shocair, CEO Yoox Net-A-Porter Group Middle East, telling Arabian Business their Ramadan Edit will feature 30 percent more exclusive designs than it did last year.
In the interview, Shocair also addressed the Group’s ongoing localisation efforts to achieve “local reach and relevancy.”
What are the group’s efforts for localisation and what is the significance of this element for you?
While we are a global organisation, localisation helps us achieve local reach and relevancy that help us build deeper connections with the Middle Eastren customers. It also allows us to champion regional brands by giving them global exposure and offering them the required support to launch on any of our platforms.
For example, we relaunched Elie Saab last year, with the collection selling out almost immediately – and now we have Elie Saab exclusives this Ramadan. We also champion regional brands such as Renaissance Renaissance who was one of the winners of our Vanguard Education Fund winners, Net-A-Porter’s talent incubator programme.
Our support doesn’t stop at launching these brands, we also offer 360 marketing communications solutions to really hone in on the key messages that each brand offers its customers in the region.
We also take diversity and inclusion very seriously. In our Dubai-based team, we have over 20 nationalities; 60 percent of whom are women. That sentiment trickles down to our selection of talents, for instance we just shot Yoox’s first-ever regional Ramadan campaign that will run globally in honour of the Holy Month of Ramadan.
We have successfully launched numerous Net-A-Porter Ramadan campaigns where we collaborated with regional talents to shoot the assets. Our Ramadan campaign gets featured on our ever-green modestwear edit and it’s a big traffic driver to the site each year.
We work very closely with our global counterparts on created dedicated assets for the region that really speaks to the GCC customer across key regional moments. For instance, we celebrate each National Day with a 360 campaign that talks to the nuances of each Middle Eastren market. We also catered to our Emirati women during Emirati Women’s Day last year and it won’t be any different this year where we are working on a mix of online and offline activations for the moment.
What’s being offered this Ramadan based on trends captured from previous consumer habits and spending?
This year, we have a 30 percent increase in the number of exclusive designs in the Ramadan edit versus last year, particularly with the ready to wear selection.
Regional ready-to- wear brands including Reem Acra and Taller Marmo are joined by homeware brands such as Nimerology, as well as fine jewelry brands such as Ananya.
What changes do you see in e-commerce now that coronavirus related restrictions are easing up?
For us at YNAP, we’ve always been digital content driven, striving to be lifestyle hubs that speak to the interest of our customers – particularly in the Middle East.
Covid only enhanced these efforts as we aimed to continously create engaging content for everyone as they were spending more time at home and consequentially online. We actually saw that e-commerce acted as an entertainment source for our loyal customers and with our 24/7 customer service and bilingual ME personal shopping team, we were able to stay in touch with our customers for their every need.
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