Interview: Chris Pok on KrisShop’s diversification strategy and agility in crisis

KrisShop CEO Chris Pok is one of the many leading industry figures to feature at the Knowledge Hub of the Virtual Travel Retail Expo 

“At the point of KrisShop’s rebranding two years ago, we were focused on advancing beyond an inflight retail catalogue to provide shoppers with an integrated shopping experience,” says KrisShop CEO Chris Pok as he looks back on the platform’s transformation on its second anniversary.

“This decision to embrace a holistic omnichannel approach paid off tremendously over the past year with the Covid-19 crisis effectively upending the travel industry,” Pok adds. “Having KrisShop.com fully operational gave us a huge advantage as we were able to pivot quickly, though the challenge was in leveraging the platform efficiently to meet demands amid stiff competition at scale.”

KrisShop.com pivoted quickly amid the crisis and — armed with insights on consumer trends, the creation of new concept stores, an expanded assortment and timely promotions and campaigns — was able to engage with landbound consumers and perform well amid the pandemic crisis. 

As KrisShop ends its month-long Anniversary Bonanza campaign we discuss with Pok the key elements of the company’s diversification strategy and how a renewed focus on supporting local businesses, championing sustainability and health & wellness have made the platform more relevant than ever. 

The KrisShop Anniversary Bonanza started on 3 August and runs until 2 September. It features storewide promotions with discounted products, social media giveaways, a Spotify playlist and a cookout featuring celebrity chefs.

Tell us please about how your strategy has evolved through the crisis, and how different it looks today compared to two years ago when the business was rebranded?

At the point of KrisShop’s rebranding two years ago, we were very much focused on advancing beyond an inflight retail catalogue to provide shoppers with an integrated shopping experience. This ambition was manifested through our flagship ecommerce site, KrisShop.com, which led our transformation efforts to become a one-stop lifestyle retail destination, for both travellers and non-travellers alike. We spent the first year working diligently towards the goal, with the brand progressively rolling out the revamped site and new features, including multiple payment options, pre-ordering up to 60 minutes before flight, hotel delivery, and in-flight entertainment.

This decision to embrace a holistic omnichannel approach paid off tremendously over the past year, with the Covid-19 crisis effectively upending the travel industry. Inflight sales traditionally contribute significantly to KrisShop’s overall revenue, and in the face of travel bans, the ability to sustain operations meant having to channel all efforts online almost overnight.

Having KrisShop.com fully operational gave us a huge advantage as we were able to pivot quickly, though the challenge was in leveraging the platform efficiently to meet demands amid stiff competition at scale. This saw us rapidly expanding the assortment of brands and products available on our site, fast-tracking the onboarding of new partners, and reducing local delivery times so customers could receive orders at their homes as early as the same day upon checking out.

In a way, this forced trial of ecommerce has in a short year seen us accelerating the enhancement of our omnichannel offering, which would have otherwise taken us a lot longer to do.

What are your latest steps to diversify KrisShop’s revenue streams as travel has stalled? Can you identify which of these moves has proved most successful and why?

Ecommerce has no doubt been crucial to the sustenance of travel retail businesses during these difficult times. Engaging with shoppers and getting them to visit KrisShop.com repeatedly meant giving them a strong enough reason to do just that, and step one was enlarging our assortment of products as more people turned online for all their shopping needs.

In the past year, we more than quadrupled our collection of lifestyle items, and expanded our product categories to twelve and counting. We also strengthened our digital engagement efforts, meeting consumers where they are, for both the short and long term through initiatives like our concept stores.

This included the launch of KrisShop@Home, featuring home essentials for shoppers. This was subsequently complemented by Batik Label by KrisShop, another concept store designed to celebrate and showcase our strong local heritage with a series of products embellished with the iconic Singapore Airlines’ batik print.

Throughout the year, we also launched several campaigns and promotions for both local and international shoppers as citizens of the world remained landbound. The approach was very much targeted, with the team identifying key moments and expediting the onboarding of relevant brands across all our product categories to appeal to consumers.

To amplify campaigns, we worked closely with local media and influencers to highlight products available on our platform, through emerging and engaging formats like Instagram and Facebook Live and even on-site gamification. Thankfully, all of these contributed to KrisShop more than doubling our sales compared to the year before.

You have homed in on the opportunities to support local business, champion sustainability and introduce more health & wellness ranges. Do you see these as mega trends to tap into? How do you maintain the momentum behind them at KrisShop?

KrisShop’s ability to remain competitive in a challenging season has relied greatly on watching trends to understand and analyse conversations happening not just around our brand, but our industry. In a time where shoppers are a lot more conscious about mindful consumption, we are learning every day what it means to curate products that resonate their sense of social, cultural and environmental awareness. This vigilance with monitoring trends has greatly worked in our favour and will continue to be a strategy that we employ moving forward. To elaborate further on the three trends that we’ve ramped up efforts on:

Supporting local businesses

The three objectives of the Singapore Tourism Board partnership are to jointly market local brands, extend their ecommerce reach and to help them create a seamless online shopping experience

We’ve always taken pride in being a heritage-rich, uniquely Singapore brand, and over recent years we have doubled down on efforts to fly the national flag high. This is seen in not just the way we deliberately curate local products for KrisShop.com, but also in our active decisions to partner and expand partnerships with homegrown business owners.

With the growing momentum of the #supportlocal movement in Singapore over the past year, we’ve pushed our mandate further by collaborating with Singapore Tourism Board, where we are the exclusive e-commerce platform for an integrated retail and incubation project called Design Orchard. This partnership seeks to spotlight homegrown brands and the vibrancy of Singapore’s retail scene. It also complements the local Made with Passion initiative which we are an official supporter of. As part of the project, we have we onboarded a myriad of homegrown brands to our local-themed concept store, ‘With Love, SG’, which now features over 100 local names in food, fashion, accessories and more.

This was an opportunity to not just profile local goods for the locals, but also expose our homegrown businesses to an international crowd, who are often impressed by our excellent craft quality and eclectic, uniquely-Singapore flavour.

KrisShop Green underscores the omnichannel retailer’s commitment to environmental sustainability via empowering greener lifestyles

Championing sustainability

Sustainability is arguably the biggest buzzword across all major industries and at KrisShop, we are playing our part through the types of products that we introduce, as well as our packaging.

From a product perspective, we launched a sustainability themed concept story last May called KrisShop Green, which aims to encourage responsible consumption and greener lifestyles amongst our shoppers. The store boasts over 100 products and was developed based on our observation that consumers are increasingly intent on understanding humanity’s impact on the environment and have a growing preference for brands that can empower them to play a part in protecting our planet.

From a packaging perspective, KrisShop is committed to reducing our plastic footprint by -50% by the end of 2022. To fulfil this ambition, we have made strides in rethinking our packaging efforts, which include packaging our deliveries in recycled, single-walled craft paper boxes printed with water-soluble ink. We also make it a point to ship our products in smaller packages, with packaging developed in various sizes to minimise waste. Within the packages, we’ve also replaced bubble fillers with corrugated paper which protects items equally well. Even our wrapping paper is made of FSC-certified paper.

Since 2019, we have reduced the use of paper packaging by more than 11 tonnes and avoided the use of close to 2.5 tonnes of plastic packaging and remain dedicated to being responsible stewards of the Earth’s finite resources in the long-term.

KrisShop Green features over 100 products across 20 brands, curated on five pillars: Clean Beauty, Cruelty-Free, Eco-friendly, Organic and Recyclable

Advocating for Health and Wellness

Health, wellness and beauty have always been important categories for KrisShop as this sector encompasses a wide variety of products, from skincare and cosmetics to fitness devices and supplements. They are also categories in which we traditionally experience repeat purchases from customers.

With the pandemic creating a spike in attention and demand for such products, KrisShop rose to the occasion by accelerating the onboarding of related brands, and even launched a brand new sports and fitness category. The latest products we’ve introduced in this mix are in fact bicycles, which are already quickly gaining popularity with Covid-19 heralding what has been coined “the great bicycle boom”. In addition, we have also hosted a series of targeted campaigns and content partnerships around related topics to feed and sustain interest.

The KrisShop ecommerce platform was launched on the KrisWorld inflight entertainment (IFE) system on 28 June onboard Singapore Airlines

How do you see the integration of entertainment and e-shopping progressing at KrisShop? What are the next steps in your drive to introduce ‘live shopping’ opportunities onboard?

The integration of entertainment and e-shopping stems from an awareness that when travel makes a come-back, inflight retail will need to exemplify new customer engagement approaches based on the current climate.

We’re proud to have had a head start in this area, working with Singapore Airlines and AirFree/Thales to enable an industry-first inflight live online shopping function, with KrisShop’s e-commerce platform available via the KrisWorld in-flight entertainment (IFE) system. This was launched in June this year, and so the ongoing travel restrictions have inevitably put a cap on the number of people able to enjoy this experience.

We are really looking forward to having more travellers engage in ecommerce 30,000 feet in the sky, who can receive their purchases on their next flight or at their doorstep. As more people get acquainted with IFE shopping in the near future, we hope to capture user experience sentiment from consumers and are excited about enhancing the process in the mid-to-long term.

Customers are able to choose from over 4,000 products across a wide range of categories including exclusive merchandise, beauty products, fragrances, electronics, and wines & spirits onboard Singapore Airlines with KrisShop

What has been the reaction to the Anniversary Bonanza campaign? What highlights can you select in terms of stand-out sales by category or product?

The response to our Anniversary Bonanza campaign has been really positive, with non-stop activities to engage shoppers throughout August from deals and steals to social media games and livestream cookouts. So far, we’ve already seen an uptick in site visitors by over +50% compared to last month.

One of the best performing components of our celebrations so far has been our daily surprises, where shoppers can wake up to a different treat everyday be it a brand discount, giveaway or mini-game. Our memory game, where shoppers can tease their brains and win promo codes for up to S$20 off at a time, have been popular with fans.

We are heartened at how well received our Anniversary Bonanza has been so far. For us at KrisShop, the festivities are not just a means to commemorate a milestone moment in a significant manner, but also a way to thank our shoppers, who have been steadfast in their support of KrisShop even through a trying year.

The Anniversary Bonanza includes -20% off regular-priced items with a minimum spend of S$250 (US$185), and additional discounts for American Express cardholders. Up to -60% discounts are offered on products from brands including Bang & Olufsen, Kavalan, LG, Skin Inc and SMEG

How are you preparing for the future of travel retail once travel recovery begins and then accelerates? How different do you anticipate consumer demand will be? What role will ecommerce play in travel retail’s new era?

Looking ahead, KrisShop will continue to champion our omnichannel efforts to strengthen the touchpoints that we have to both a local and international audience. While travel looks to be soon in the cards, we are cognisant that governments will adopt a cautious roll-out, and hence expect a length of time before the tourism sector experiences a tangible uptick from international traffic.

As such, in the short to mid-term, ecommerce channels will remain the optimal strategy for audience penetration. Operationally, this means taking active steps to diversify our offerings and review our product mix even as shopper behaviour evolves yet again with new travel developments.

Where inflight retail is concerned, we are gearing up for reformed ways of working with existing partners to establish new customer engagement approaches based on current trends and developments. Both airlines and land-based retailers offer a wide portfolio of products, but they each have a clear point of distinction – the former offers dwell-time in the air while the latter offers dwell-time on-ground. The future of inflight retail thus needs to leverage the core strengths of all parties, including land-based retailers that have a stake in travel, to present an enhanced experience for consumers like never before.

The Modern Singapore Collective is KrisShop’s extended ‘With Love SG’ concept store. It is a testament to KrisShop’s commitment to developing meaningful partnerships in travel retail and beyond.

How do you see partnerships, especially with brand owners, evolving? What are you asking of them as you seek to co-create the future?

Among the many lessons that the pandemic has taught us, a key learning we’ve gleaned is that together is often better.

Partnerships have been a lifeline to a great many retail businesses in a season of choppy waters, with the victims of store closures and sharp declines in consumer spending counting on collaboration as a means to stay afloat. Smaller, more specialty players have tapped organisations with well-established ecosystems to expand their products’ reach, while bigger companies have looked to independent, bespoke businesses for their craftsmanship skills to produce unique products that can cut through the clutter.

We have found ourselves on both the giving and receiving ends of this process over the past year and partnering in a time of crisis has meant being in constant communication, committing to being transparent, focusing on problem solving and compromising, and being empathetic to each other’s needs.

As we look to continue expanding and diversifying our offerings, partnerships – whether in the form of direct collaboration, affiliation or even distribution – these traits will continue to be central to yielding efficiencies on both sides. We will need to continue having honest conversations with current and existing partners to develop win-win outcomes as we work together to find our way out of the woods.

Click on the image above to read The Moodie Davitt eZine’s on location report of the KrisShop relaunch in 2019
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