Between The Flags
Delivering an omni-channel eCommerce Retail Strategy.
Since 1994, Between the Flags has been designing classic beach and lifestyle apparel to honour and uphold the spirit of Australia’s surf culture.
With 37,000km’s of coastline and over 11,000 beaches, Australia is best known for its outdoor lifestyle, bronzed bodies in bikinis, slick-bodied surfers and white sandy beaches. Next to that are our ever vigilant lifesavers donning the iconic red and yellow rescue caps. It’s what ‘down under’ is all about – it’s what 6 million visitors come to get a taste of every year!
Between The Flags celebrate this at each of their stores and online.
What we did:
The brief
Between The Flags approached COG Strategy with a brief to create a tactical and strategic environment between both retail store and online store.
Between The Flags is an iconic Australian offer, situated in the heart of Bondi Beach it’s become an important tourism fixture and a key stop off for international tourists and domestic day trippers.
With retail outlets in Darling Harbour in the heart of Sydney CBD, and two stores in Bondi, the marquee store on Campbell Parade, and the theme store in the Bondi Pavilion, the retail footprint achieves high quality and high volume foot traffic, specifically throughout the summer months.
The brief focused on creating an omni-channel environment to manage the brand touchpoints and eCommerce trading strategically.
With a strong Australiana offer and a classy souvenir offering, the attraction to grab a piece of Australia for tourists and Australians alike is strong. With tourist customers often becoming online customers before and after their visit to Bondi Beach, the synergy between physical and virtual needed to be strengthened. Also, with the Covid-19 Pandemic, it promoted Bondi Beach as a wish list destination to those not yet able to travel abroad to Australia the summer, thus focusing more emphasis on the digital assets and eCommerce trading platform.
The COG Strategy Solution
A tactical and strategic approach to an omni-channel strategy for retail trading and virtual eCommerce trading.
This included customer identification, retail and virtual trading seasonality, customer behavioural tracking, targeting and acquisition, brand asset creation and digital marketing strategy.
By mapping back to back calendar years for retail and virtual trade, our research delivered key insights into the relationship between customer and product sales. These insights were achieved from both physical store analysis and online traffic and data research.
Using retail store data sets that include demographics, customer origin, time and date visitation, reason for travel, reason for visit, store visit frequency, product purchase amount and styles we were able to understand some intimate details that could be used to support online eCommerce strategy.
Combining our Digital Strategy and eCommerce Strategy with the above approach enabled a synergy to be created and refined over the course of both southern hemisphere summers and northern hemisphere summers simultaneously. Insight provided us the information that the endless summer is achieve for Between The Flags trade and was a key element to this successful omni-channel strategy.
With the assistance from COG Digital for all eCommerce and Digital Marketing, and COG Design for all Brand Management, Creative Direction and creative design artwork assets, the execution for this long term strategy was a full through the line program.
The results
We grew global online sales to 44 countries, and exceeded 200%+ ROAS for 2 consecutive years.
COG Strategy created a synergy between both retail and online customers that enabled over 30% of retail customers to become online customer post store visitation.
Inspired by Aussie surf lifesaving and iconic beach culture, our bestselling Beach Patrol is designed specifically for sun-safe kids. Considerably comfy, durable and adorable, you’ll wish we made them for grown-ups!