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 person wh
who ranked #9 – Miss Amara’s head of customer & people Lydia Bertini.
The creative problem-solver
Like many young Australians, Lydia Bertini got a part-time retail job to support herself while attending university. But it wasn’t long before she realised that interacting with people at David Jones was far more interesting than studying for her law degree.
“I was looking forward to being on the shop floor and connecting with customers so much more than I was looking forward to sitting alone with a huge textbook,” Bertini told Inside Retail.
“I ended up spending more and more time at my retail job, and then I took on a full-time role with David Jones as a sales manager. I did their management course and was there for six-and-a-half years. That was the beginning of my retail career, and I never looked back.”
From David Jones, Bertini went to work for Pandora as a regional sales manager, where she had the opportunity to travel internationally and understand how a successful global brand works from the inside. She then joined Tigerlily, where she looked after the store network, and later Sheike, where she was national retail manager.
For Bertini, the appeal of working in retail has always been about problem-solving. Particularly when it comes to bricks-and-mortar retail, she loves being presented with questions and problems that require her to think on her feet and come up with out-of-the-box solutions – it’s energising.
As a parent, however, the demands of the job and constant travel can also be difficult to manage. So in 2020, in search of a more flexible workplace, she decided to make the leap into e-commerce, and landed at Miss Amara, an online rug brand that she had long admired.
Over the past three years, she has been surprised at times to discover just how seamlessly her skills and experience – accumulated over 15 years of working in stores – have translated to the world of online.
“In a bricks-and-mortar environment, you do a lot of training around how to connect with customers authentically. I think the exciting thing about e-commerce is that you have the opportunity to curate that more than you do in stores,” she said.
“We can use those core principles of journey-mapping, asking relevant questions, finding out the customer’s ‘why’, but in a more multifaceted way.”
One example of this is the free styling service Miss Amara offers to help customers design their room around its rugs. The service is a unique point of difference for the brand, and a major revenue-driver, but Bertini saw an opportunity to improve it even further. Over the past year, she has invested in training and education – all team members are now qualified stylists – and optimised the look and feel of their proposals. As a result, demand for the styling service has almost doubled and the conversion rate is up by 24 per cent.
“That’s something I learned from bricks-and-mortar. When I worked at David Jones, [then CEO] Paul Zahra would be standing on the shop floor at Christmas time, welcoming customers. I believe that all those touch points contribute to revenue,” she said.
“You might not be able to quantify it, but the more you listen to your customer and the more you can tailor your offering to them, the better your conversion rate is going to be.”
Another area of focus for Bertini is growing the brand’s burgeoning B2B segment. Since she first identified that interior designers and stylists were purchasing rugs more frequently than the average customer, trade sales have increased and are forecast to account for 10 per cent of total sales by the end of this year.
“We’re seeing organic growth in that segment just by listening to their needs and catering to them,” she said.
Within the business, the establishment of a paid parental leave scheme at Miss Amara is one of her proudest achievements.
“It was something I felt really passionate about, because it enabled me to reclaim my career and forge a new path in the e-commerce industry, which I’ve been so grateful for,” she said.