Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce is an annual ranking of the most impressive and inspiring leaders in Australia’s online retail industry. Our 2023 report features C-level executives with decades of leadership experience, alongside start-up founders and digital specialists with a wide range of skills, from marketing to logistics. You can download it here. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing in-depth profiles of this year’s Top 10. Today, we’re bringing you the pe
person who ranked #3 – The Iconic CEO Erica Berchtold.
The accidental retailer
A naturally curious person who loves talking to strangers, Erica Berchtold was planning to become a journalist when fate intervened.
“I was working in PR and ended up being exposed to the Harvey Norman business. I absolutely loved the business and begged them for a job,” she told Inside Retail. “They gave me a job as a buyer, and I really came into my own there.”
She soon became general manager of sportswear chain Rebel, which Harvey Norman owned in the early 2000s, and later general manager of Specialty Fashion Group’s Crossroads and Autograph brands, before Super Retail Group tapped her to once again run the sportswear retailer after acquiring it in 2011.
“I’m an accidental retailer,” Berchtold said. “I didn’t imagine my career would be retail. But now I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”
It helps that she is endlessly fascinated by people and what makes them tick. Why does one person respond to 50 per cent off, and one person respond to half price? As CEO of The Iconic, she has the opportunity to ask these questions daily.
“We might launch a promo, and for some reason, it’s just not working. I’ll say, ‘Let’s change the artwork a bit,’ and all of a sudden, it starts a fire,” she said. “I’m naturally a very curious person, and I think retail gives you a lot to be curious about.”
Since joining Australia’s leading online fashion retailer in 2019, Berchtold’s understanding of e-commerce, and the various levers you need to pull to be successful, has grown considerably.
“By the time I left Rebel, about 10 per cent of our sales were online, which was actually quite large for a traditional retailer in pre-Covid times. But I’m now embarrassed to think that I thought I knew everything about online retail. I’m glad I didn’t say that out loud, because it’s a different world,” she said.
“The way that you have to engage customers and develop a sense of loyalty when you don’t have physical touch points is quite foreign.”
At the time, however, Berchtold wasn’t dwelling on all the things she didn’t know about e-commerce. She was five months pregnant when she started the role, and was more preoccupied with questions like, “When am I going to have the baby? And, how’s that going to work?”
Ultimately, she said, the idea that you can ever know everything about a business or particular industry is a fallacy, particularly in a fast-changing environment like retail.
“As soon as you bed something down and go, ‘Here’s a great way of retailing this particular category,’ customers get sick of that and want something new,” she explained. “As a retailer, you’re never going to stop learning or wanting to find new ways of doing things.”
This has been one of the key themes at The Iconic the past few years, as it has gone from being one of Australia’s original e-commerce disruptors, to becoming a major player that is now being disrupted by a new generation of online retailers.
Under Berchtold’s leadership, The Iconic has significantly expanded the range of products it offers – from fashion to beauty, sportswear, homewares and lifestyle products – and transitioned to a hybrid business model, where brands and suppliers can list products on the platform and do their own order fulfilment and delivery, or outsource it to The Iconic.
One particularly innovative feature that the company launched last year is called “size refill”. This enables The Iconic to redirect an order directly to the supplier if it doesn’t have the right size in stock in its warehouse. “Not many retailers in the world have that,” Berchtold said.
The Iconic also launched autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in its Yennora fulfilment centre, increasing its capacity and speeding up its already fast processing times significantly. The AMRs will be crucial as the retailer looks to grow its fulfilment-as-a-service offering for brands in the future.
The retailer also created its first NFT, established an incubator program for First Nations designers and set a new sales record on Black Friday, while setting many other milestones.
“There’s so much we’re onto,” Berchtold said. “One minute, I’m thinking about that cool new technology that’s going to give us more capacity in the fulfilment centre, and then we’ve got a runway show. That’s what I love about my role.”
After four years on the job, however, she has decided to tackle a new challenge. Last week, she announced that she is taking on the CEO role at Best & Less Group, effective 4 September.