5 Minutes with Patagonia’s Head of Digital, Angela Clark
eBay, Levi-Strauss, Pottery Barn, Eddie Bauer, elf Cosmetics - Angela Clark has an outstanding track record for making an IMPACT for eCommerce’s giants. A true digital virtuoso with a reputation for digital transformation brilliance – in under 5 minutes, Angela gives her expert advice on how connect with consumers, her top 3 strategies for profit growth and the hottest new technologies you can’t afford not to know about!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and Patagonia?
I lead the digital experience for patagonia.com and Patagonia Action Works and manage the site experience, acquisition and retention marketing, user experience, technology solutions, consumer insights, and analytics for both platforms. Patagonia are internationally recognized for their commitment to authentic product quality and environmental activism, donating 1% of sales annually, contributing over $100 million in grants and in-kind donations since 1985.
My background is in brand and digital strategy for some of America’s most iconic brands - Levi Strauss, eBay, Pottery Barn to name a few.
What are the top 3 strategies you can invest in to effectively market your brand and grow profits?
We have amazing storytellers in-house the produce beautiful films, well written blog articles and other long-form content to engage deeply and uniquely with our customers. We're investing a lot of effort in turning this content into short-form content to fit a multitude of platforms to enhance effective storytelling in all channels. We have always found our content inspires the hearts of our customers who we know care about the actions we take. Our intention is to make sure we land the right content on the right channels - enhance our reach and communicate our values and mission through our content creation. Our stories get circulated and celebrated – we want to grow this so we continue to invest in internal talent to help drive the strategy and create more interactive content, a more dynamic shopping experience and CRM to support our mission.
Lastly, we are investing in redesigning some key areas of the site that need updating to drive more CVR, AOV, UPT and reduce returns. The “why” – to continue to improve the site experience and reduce purchase friction because the site has not been updated in a few years .The “how” - is we implemented a better desktop PDP experience, adding interactive content on the PLPs and linking long form content to product storytelling and selling.
How does Patagonia embrace transparency to connect with value-driven consumers?
We release an annual report showcasing our efforts on climate activism in environmental impact which resonates deeply with our community. You can also find on our site several locations where we speak very candidly about what we're doing right and what work we still need to do. These messages exist in e-mails at the consumer level and then in dedicated locations throughout the site. We prioritize our transparency and make sure our PR and articles about our efforts around the globe contain the truth of what we believe.
Below are examples of where we showcase some of our efforts, we leverage this content in retention channels and sometimes acquisition channels as well Like e-mail and SMS.
Source: Patagonia Climate Goals
Source: Patagonia Action Works
In your opinion, which is the hottest most exciting technology to look out for in retail this year?
Live shopping and conversational commerce are two areas where I think if used correctly could infuse human connection through the digital shopping experience even if it's not to purchase overtly but to help educate and inform and help guide knowledge about our product and other efforts.
Check out Angela's Keynote Case Study: How Patagonia’s shakeup challenges marketers to act on sustainability measures that have the biggest impact
on Day 2, Main Conference, 8 June 2023
