Hey Mattias, tell us about yourself
Hey, I have over 20 years of experience in the IT industry before I joined MQ Marqet. Here I am currently heading up e-commerce, IT and logistics.
Tell us more about MQ Marqet
MQ Marqet (formerly known as MQ) was founded in 1957 and is the biggest fashion retail brand chain in Sweden, with 90 stores located all around the country. In addition, we have a digital store at mq.se. The MQ Marqet team consists of 65 people in our headquarters and over 600 team members in our stores.
What are your goals going forward?
It’s no secret that the former MQ had a couple of rough years before we decided to relaunch the brand. With our new repositioning with MQ Marqet and new strategy with an increased focus on our digital business, we feel we are well-positioned to get back to our previously strong position. We offer a timeless assortment of fashion for men and women that can be worn for both business and leisure. This type of fashion is highly appreciated by customers right now and with our digital presence in combination with our strong network of stores across Sweden we can build relationships with customers in several channels which is a big strength.
Our goal going forward is for 30% of our revenue to be e-commerce based, whilst also grow revenue through our stores. We believe e-commerce revenue will mainly come from new markets through marketplaces such as Zalando, where we recently launched on 7 markets.
Which markets have you expanded to through Zalando and why?
Germany, France, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, and Finland. The reason why we picked these specific markets was because we felt that our assortment would fit the style of the customers and that our brands would complement other brands on that market. We are of course evaluating an expansion to more markets.
What results have you seen from your international expansion through Zalando?
We’ve seen great success in Germany. Our timeless business outfits and blouses are really appreciated in Germany. We also see that some of our Swedish customers buy our items through Zalando in addition to our stores or mq.se.
Any good tip to succeed on a marketplace?
It’s always good to invest in ads to increase visibility of your products in the searches on the marketplace.
How did you use Occtoo to ease your expansion to Zalando marketplace?
Occtoo made the expansion to Zalando marketplace really smooth. The Zalando API is known to be tricky to work with and implementation takes time, but with Occtoo’s feeds we were up and running much faster than what we’ve heard from industry colleagues expanding to Zalando.
Occtoo’s business model is also the most customer-friendly I’ve seen. Similar solutions charge a percentage of revenue. Because Occtoo charges one flat fee per destination we can scale friction-less without the cost eating at our own margins.
What will you build next to improve your digital customer experience?
We are looking into making some digital improvements to our physical stores and a B2B digital store, the specifics I will have to tell you more about later 😉. I can say that when we started to explore these initiatives, we initially expected time-consuming and expensive integrations to make the required data available in a format that fitted the new receiving systems. With Occtoo, we quickly realized that because we had the necessary data instantly available it was an easy task to make it available to the new systems, no integrations needed, and the task just took a couple of days! This was really eye-opening, how fast we could execute with Occtoo. Especially compared to how time-consuming it would have been if we would have solved this task the old traditional, way building point-to-point integrations.
We have radically increased our speed of execution now that we have all experience data instantly available in Occtoo. We never have to wait for an integration before we can get started with a new digital initiative
How do you find it to collaborate with the Occtoo team?
It is always fun to collaborate with the Occtoo team since they are very innovation-focused, and every new idea is always met with excitement. They are also very quick to both respond and execute. Since the founders have a previous background from PIM, their knowledge about how to handle product flows are exceptionally high. They can really support a retail fashion brand like us because they understand our business processes.
Thanks for the chat Mattias, really looking forward to hearing about those new initiatives soon!
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About Occtoo
Occtoo is an Experience Data Platform that supports retailers and brands to build relevant digital experiences and applications at rapid speed. Occtoo’s SaaS platform makes it easy to access and unify enterprise data from backend systems such as CRM, ERP, PIM, etc. and combine it with behavioural and contextual data to create relevant digital experiences that can be deployed in any channel or frontend in real-time at a global scale. Occtoo is certified by the MACH Alliance and has companies such as Cartier, Fjällräven, and Nordic Nest on their customer list.