Dressing well may run in the family, but Ian Rosen wants to make it easy for everyone to be expertly styled so they can look good, and feel good, in everything they do.
Rosen, who is a third-generation leader of the well-known Canadian menswear brand, Harry Rosen, is currently President and Chief Operating Officer of the business, which operates under three banners: The core Harry Rosen physical and online stores, the outlet division which includes five locations and the discount online experience, Final Cut by Harry Rosen. Ian’s father is CEO of the business, his brother is Vice President of the Outlet Division and his grandfather, Harry Rosen himself, is the namesake of the brand.
Known for its top-notch customer service and craftsmanship, Harry Rosen has been around since 1954. It wasn’t until the COVID pandemic hit that the company fully realized not only that e-commerce was critical to keeping demand alive at a time when being in-store wasn’t an option, but that with the right technology in place, that online experience could be just as rich as being in a physical store.
For several years prior to joining Harry Rosen in 2018, Rosen worked at Bain & Company where he found a passion for advising consumer and retail brands on their corporate strategy. That largely focused on what he refers to as their “Amazon strategies” – in other words, how to keep the giant at bay by having the precise technology and go-to-market strategies to stand out.
Getting a rush out of what Rosen called the gamble of betting on what would or wouldn’t make consumers tick, Rosen decided it was time to put his chips into the family business. He joined Harry Rosen as Executive Vice President of Digital and Corporate Strategy. In this role, technology became a crucial area of his focus with Rosen and team overseeing e-commerce, digital and product development, analytics and more.
When the pandemic brought life as we knew it to a halt in 2020, Rosen and his team were tasked with re-architecting the corporate strategy and, thus, rethinking how Harry Rosen invested in technology.
“We took a big swing in terms of figuring out how to build an online experience to complement what was a legendary in-store experience,” he said. “We mapped out exactly what we wanted to deliver and how we would go about making that happen in the digital world. MACH ended up being the answer.”
In August of 2020, Harry Rosen re-launched with an entirely new online experience. That year, the company’s e-commerce business tripled from the previous year and online became Harry Rosen’s top-selling store.
But building that store didn’t happen overnight.
“We owe a lot to the MACH Alliance for helping to make our IT architecture decisions make sense,” said Rosen. “Knowing the technology had been vetted and that the vendors we chose were certified sped up our process significantly and gave us confidence in knowing we were bringing in all the right players.”
And so came the need to stitch together a series of best-fit tools like Amplience for content management, commercetools for cart and promotions, Algolia for search, Bold Commerce for checkout, Dynamic Yield for AB testing, Orium (formerly MyPlanet) as the systems integrator … the list goes on. Rosen described how all of these different platforms could be seamlessly integrated, each serving its own specific purpose but collectively, creating this rich digital experience for shoppers that could simply not be done with a traditional monolithic platform.
“Just about everything we touch now has that MACH Alliance stamp of approval,” he said.
A deeply service-oriented company, part of Rosen’s aim when rebuilding and relaunching the Harry Rosen digital experience was to be sure those personalized offerings, such as the company’s professional clothing advisors, were still at the center.
“We didn’t want to abandon the in-store offerings that make shopping Harry Rosen special,” said Rosen. “We invested heavily in building a tool directly into our web experience that would enable customers to still engage with a clothing advisor just as they would in a physical store. Bringing our most used customer service features right into the digital world has paid dividends.”
Rosen would tell others considering undergoing a MACH transition that the hardest part of doing so is betting on the unknown in terms of readiness.
“From a digital maturity perspective, we asked ourselves more than once, ‘Are we there yet?’” Rosen said. “We’re a small to mid-size company, and to take this on, you need to have a certain level of digital maturity.”
“There are all-in-one solutions out there to be a ‘B’ student in digital,” said Rosen. “The question we kept going back to was ‘How important is it for us to become an ‘A’ student and shape a vision for retail compared to everything else that’s out there.”
For Rosen and his team at Harry Rosen, the decision to take the steps and invest in order to be an A student was a simple one, even if it meant spending more up-front to build a digital backbone that could deliver e-commerce success for the long haul.
As Rosen described, he and his team put a higher dollar amount than what the company had ever invested in digital tech in front of the executive board. Yet that amount was a tenth of what the company had planned to put forth to renovate a physical store. When weighing the longer-term ROI, it became clear that investing digitally made equal, if not greater sense for the business. The company would capitalize time and again on those investments, as Rosen said, and that is exactly what they’ve done.
“The MACH Alliance has made me look smarter than I am,” Rosen said with a smile. “They helped us make sense of a very-much evolving software landscape on the commerce side of things. It’s only going to get more complex, so being able to help evangelize this point of view for others is important to me. I want to benefit the entire ecosystem as much as possible.”
“The people behind the Alliance are completely reshaping commerce and writing a new set of rules,” he added. “When you’re a third-generation business trying to balance staying true to who you are while also reinventing yourself to avoid falling behind, you want to be part of a group like the MACH Alliance.”
The MACH Alliance is very excited to welcome Ian as an Ambassador. Our Ambassadors are a carefully selected group of business and technology experts with a wide range of experience across industries and backgrounds. Passionate about the benefits a modern architecture can bring to an enterprise, our Ambassadors have graciously committed their time to support the mission of the MACH Alliance by writing, speaking, and serving as subject matter experts to help empower companies to go MACH.
If you’re interested in learning more about a MACH approach and understanding if it’s right for your business, we welcome you to get in touch at info@machalliance.org to be matched with the MACH Alliance Ambassador most relevant to you.