Welcome to our Podcast, Who What Wear with Hillary Kerr. Think of it as your direct line to the designers, stylists, beauty experts, editors and tastemakers who are shaping the world of fashion and beauty. Subscribe to Who What Wear with Hillary Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
For Net-a-Porter’s market director, Libby Page, no two days of work are alike. She started at Net-a-Porter eight years ago when she was hired as a fashion assistant. “My role is really to establish the link between purchasing, Marketing and copywriting and to provide holistic information about the trends we are investing in, the product we really like,” she says. “I joined the Editorial Board as a fashion assistant, which, in my opinion, is always the best way to learn the basics in any fashion store you are in.”
Now, as market director, Page is largely responsible for Net-A-Porter’s highly organized collections, constantly thinking and researching what the customer wants. “We can see which changes she buys the most. We can see where they spend the most time on the site, which campaigns they click on. So we use all this to make the decisions that we make in order to offer the product that we know she will love,” she says.
In the latest episode of Who What Wear with Hillary Kerr, Page talks about what her job looks like today, the trends she sees in Denim, and more. For excerpts from their conversation, scroll below.
I’ve been there for eight years. I got to know Net-A-Porter very, very well. I joined the Editorial Board as a fashion assistant, which, in my opinion, is always the best way to learn the basics in any fashion store you are in. Then, about five years ago, I worked in our purchasing team as a Junior market editor and now a market director, which is really exciting.
I would say that my work has many different facets, but my role is really to establish the link between purchasing, Marketing and copywriting and to provide holistic information on the trends we are investing in, the product we really like, to ensure that all our marketing communications really align with our purchasing strategy. I think our customers are so concerned about the content and how they buy and how they inform their buying decisions, [so] we really want to make sure that they are guided by everything that we really care about from a product point of view.
It’s really about these holistic ideas and making sure that everything sings from the same vocal sheet. It’s a really, really dynamic job.
If you said “the right mix” there, that’s the most important thing. It can be easy to think about your personal tastes, but in the end we must be guided by the data. We can see which social posts our client likes. We can see which changes she buys the most. We can see where they spend the most time on the site, which campaigns they click on. We use all this to inform the choices we make in order to offer the product that we know you will love.
Myself, the buyers, the people we talk to, we are also Net-A-Porter’s customers. We know each other very well. I think there is often a general consensus within the team that we all really care about something, or we don’t feel like it will be good for our client. We are usually on the money because we are all our customers.
Personal tastes play a little. We are all trying to get our hands on the Alaïa Mesh Flats, myself included — and our customers. I also met the client as an old friend. There is knowledge that you learn that the data cannot provide. It’s just this Intuition and instinct.
