After seven years at Sid Lee, Eric Alper made the jump to client side this summer, taking on the role of senior vice-president of marketing at Frank & Oak.
It was a major change for the 30-year-old, who worked his way up the ladder from strategist to partner at Sid Lee. As he dives into the world of Frank & Oak, Marketing sat down with Alper, a 30 Under 30 alumnus, at the retailer’s Queen St. location in Toronto.
Here, Alper chats about agency life preparing him for the brand side of the business, his approach to Frank & Oak’s growing retail empire and how he laid the groundwork for amicably leaving the agency that gave him his first marketing gig.
How is life on the brand side?
I think there’s a major difference between being on the client side and being a consultant. When you spend a lot of time working with clients, there’s something you recognize: at some point, the 51st client is not going to be dramatically more interesting than the 50th. Sorry to say it, but it’s the truth.
The second thing you recognize – and this is no knock on clients – but many clients are driven by fear. Fear is a driving force. How do I keep my job for another day? Personally, I don’t care all that much about that. I’m still relatively young and I want to do things that have a purpose and a real impact.
How did working at an agency prepare your for being a client?
Experiencing a wide array of challenges across a diversity of categories prepared me for the improvisation that’s required on the client side. It’s not just about being a McKinsey style consultant that builds a great deck, forwards it to the client and hopes they implement the thing. You’re actually responsible for implementing.
Seeing a diverse array of challenges across categories – I’ve worked in retail, in luxury goods, in consumer electronics and tech, CPG – I can’t say I’ve seen it all, no one has seen it all, but I’ve seen such a diversity of challenges and a diversity of responses that my strategic toolbox is stronger as a result.
Even the best laid plans sometimes fail. The agency world has prepared me to deal with rejection in a tremendous way. On a great day, one fifth of the ideas you try to sell in an agency stick. On a bad day, more like one tenth of them stick.
You were at Sid Lee for many years and even made partner. What was it like transitioning out of that role?
Seven years into it, I was ready for the next step. I’ll be honest, it was great and fun, but I was bored. I told my partners I was ready to move on to the next thing and we shaped my transition plan. I went out and recruited my replacement, which took months.
The Sid Lee guys were really supportive of my taking the next step. They introduced me to some people as well. They were definitely very good friends. I was and still do talk to these people daily. Five times a day! When you’re an owner in a company like that, as I was, you don’t give two weeks notice. That’s just not the way things work.
The key thing is that it was a conversation. It was a dialogue.
Frank & Oak started as a digital brand, but it’s now building out a bricks and mortar presence. What’s your approach to using stores as a marketing channel?
If we think the experience is the message – which is not an original quote, I attribute it to a quote from a book by a guy named Max Lenderman – then a physical space is a really incredible marketing experience, or it can be.
A physical space is an opportunity for us to spend more than the fraction of a few seconds a consumer spends looking at a poster or an online display ad. It’s a chance to spend minutes if not hours with somebody.
Some of our customer interactions in-store span over an hour, especially if they have a personal styling appointment, which is a service we offer for free in our stores. Or a haircut or a shave [some of Frank & Oak’s stores house barber shops and cafes], which is a very personal experience.
What were your impressions of the Frank & Oak brand before joining the company?
It’s a brand that means more than just a damn fine $55 gingham shirt. I think Frank & Oak is more than a fashion brand. When you take an objective look at the fashion category, it’s in many cases low on insight. It’s about creative directors with an aesthetic point of view. You can imagine Karl Lagerfeld in his library stroking his cat and saying, “We’re going to make everything black pinstripes this season.”
What you wear says something about you as a person and it can influence how you feel. There’s a real opportunity for customer insight and cultural insight to infuse that conversation and we don’t see a lot of it. When you see a spring / summer and fall / winter collection launched, it’s mostly an aesthetic point of view. When I saw what the Frank & Oak guys were doing, I thought it was more insightful than average.
Frank & Oak doesn’t do big, mass campaigns. How do you think its approach differs from other retailers?
For a long time, necessity was the mother of invention. This was and remains a venture-backed startup. Because of that, the company couldn’t spend the kind of money other people do. Every dollar had to work smarter and harder.
This is a brand built around the idea of community. It started as an invitation-only site. It has created a sense of community since the beginning and it’s tried to nurture that. We have a deep group of people who have been heavily involved in shaping what we do called The Network, which is an incredible group of several hundred influencers from across North America. It’s incredible how much love these people have for the brand and the sense they feel they’re owners in it. That sense of community is a key marketing driver.
Frank & Oak grew from a small Montreal brand with a cool factor into a leading menswear company. What are the key drivers that will push it into the mainstream?
We’re still extremely young as a company. I don’t know if we’ve reached that point yet of mass. Yes, we’re in a multitude of cities in Canada, but we’re only physically in three markets in the U.S. and we’re still developing an online and physical footprint.
Continuing to build that sense of community is key. Building our stores as a hub of experience and content, too. What’s scalable about that is if you create a great experience, people will talk about it. People are a media and we want to create experiences that are worth talking about.
