 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015, brought to you by Oracle. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live at Oracle Open World, exclusive coverage of SiliconANGLE medias, the CUBE surf flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, showing Dave Vellante, founder of boogiebond.com research, and we are here with Keri Lieder, who's the director of e-commerce at Elaine Turner, customer of Oracle, practitioner out, adopting the commerce club. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So tell us a little about the company first, what you guys do, and then your relationship with Oracle, what are you guys using for product? Sure, so Elaine Turner is based out of Houston, Texas, and Elaine Turner herself is a fashion designer, and so we design accessible luxury products for women, and they're primarily accessories, so those are handbags and shoes and jewelry, and it's about two seasons ago, we now are doing apparel. And so we have partnered with Oracle to help us replatform from our current e-commerce platform over to their new commerce cloud product. What was the biggest issues that you guys were having, and what did Oracle do to solve that? You're on the commerce cloud, right? Correct. So not on-premise, but the cloud. The cloud, yes. How did you guys come to that share, your onboarding experience? Was it an aspirin? Was it a vitamin? All the above, how did you guys get to the cloud? Sure, so we've actually had, we've been very fortunate, and we've been able to work directly with the product team, and so as a first adopter of commerce cloud, we've been able to help really shape the product, so when they came to us with this opportunity, we were able to explain to them what we really were lacking and what our current platform wasn't able to provide, and they've helped build a product that specifically speaks to our business needs. With our current platform, or our previous platform, because we did just launch this last Sunday, so it's been rather new, we had a very stale environment, so it was one where the company wasn't coming out with new versions of the product, they were never upgrading, so it was very stale, so there were a lot of features and functionality limitations that we were experiencing that we've been able to improve upon with commerce cloud, so it's completely changed our business. Hey, Kara, what's your role? Are you defining the requirements? Are you interfacing with the business? Are you technical? Are you writing code? I wish. So I'm the director of e-commerce, which means for me that I not only run our e-commerce strategy, but also all of our digital marketing strategy as well, so I was able to be on board in the very beginning stages going through the discovery process of looking for a new platform and then also working with the integration team, but no, not coding myself. What were your MVP minimal viable product for the cloud and what new things came about? I can imagine, obviously, you don't want to lose sales. You have the normal e-commerce, people want to buy, but digital is also an omni-channel, so you got Twitter, you got Instagram, people are probably using a lot of Facebook. All your customers are engaging, certainly the younger ones, but also you have people who might want to dial up the telephone and have it look through a catalog, so how do you bridge all that together and what did the commerce cloud enable you to do? Absolutely, so we do have 10 stores and we do a lot of our fulfillment of product and of online orders through our stores, so we were able to integrate our commerce cloud platform with our order management system, which enables us to have real-time inventory, so what's great about that is customers are going to be able to see not only when product is starting to count down and we're starting to see five left, four left and really instill that urgency to go ahead and make the purchase, but additionally, we'll be able to tell them when we have a certain product at a particular store, they want to go in and pick it up or shop in stores, so that's one of the opportunities that we've had to really build a little bit more of an omni-channel experience, but also one thing that's really important to us is our in-store event platform, so we host a lot of events in our stores and through those we like to donate money to charities and so we raise a lot of money through these events for different organizations in our community and so what we're looking to do in one of the roadmap opportunities for us is to build an interface through the Commerce Cloud that will allow us to coordinate, schedule those events. You can plan every aspect of the in-store event online and then even after the event, we'd like to be able to post pictures to remind people what a wonderful time they had and let them know how much money they were able to donate to the charity of choice that they were hosting the event for, so we're doing a lot of different things to hopefully translate that really unique in-store experience that we have online into a digital environment. So talk more about your differentiation strategy because you think about the little hardware store in the big box, you know, companies and so retail faces a similar dynamic. How is it that Elaine Turner differentiates from the big giant buy anything you want player? So I think in-store, we have a really unique experience. We call it our dream experience in-store and so it's important to us that we do a lot of clientele and really get to know our customers and we really want them to feel at home when they come to our stores so we have big pink couches where we want them to come sit down, we offer them wine and champagne, we really want them to come into the store, sit and stay awhile and so that's also our holiday strategy is really inviting people to host their holiday parties, their gift exchanges, their company parties in-store with us and we'll provide all of the catering and all of the drinks and everything and so we're really trying to figure out and we're looking how to bring that unique experience where we really do so much clientele and personalization online. Is there an office out here in Silicon Valley that we could host our parties at? I wish, not yet, not yet. So we're primarily in Houston right now, we have four stores in Houston, two in Dallas and we're really working and that's so important to us with Commerce Cloud is to spread that digital footprint and spread brand awareness. So one of the things you're highlighting which I love, I mean I love what you're talking about because you're printing intimacy to your customers and obviously designer, that's your model, was great. You got to have real-time information. If you give your intimate customers and potential customers false information then they might have a different experience. So obviously order manages one. Is there other areas where you're using that real-time? Is there mobility? Is there notifications? Is there social? How do you guys look at that more, that real-time? Customer touch point. Right, so we do have Instagram, our Instagram feed is built in directly into the website and so customers can see what we're posting in real-time from the website itself and I think there's a lot more opportunity in social and in fact, Elaine Turner herself really wants to be able to interact more with our customers and she can't be at every store and every event. So it's important to her that we're constantly putting out information on social media and through video content. We have a huge video content strategy and through Oracle we're now able to help sort of smooth that user experience out because customers won't have to leave the website to go to YouTube or elsewhere to watch these videos and interact with Elaine Turner. They'll be able to do so right from within the website and so we're hoping to see that our engagement metrics increase and improve over time. What advice would you have for other designers? Because I've talked to a few designers and certainly in LA and they're worried about their identity and their persona so they're worried about kind of going out in the wild if you will on social tweeting, doing Instagram and Facebook because you can post it in kind of broadcast but it's really difficult for them and I've found to do that. How do you translate that potential fear to create that intimate exclusive environment with a commerce package in the cloud with all those features? Right, so I think authenticity is really important to us and making sure that we get Elaine's authentic voice out into the community because we want people to really know who she is and what she's about and so that's an important strategy is for us to make sure that we're really connected to what's going on in Elaine's world right now and that she is constantly interacting with us and telling us, okay, this is the exact caption that I want to go out there and so we are fortunate that we have her right there in the mix of everything. Is she engaging with her customers online? Yes, yes. She's pretty prolific on social. She, well, through with the team. Through with the team, okay. Yes, I don't know that she is quite the person. It's like a heat shield, it's a entourage. Right, well, she wants to be more involved and I think it's just a matter of time before she's able to do so but right now we have a close team that's constantly texting, engaging with her and putting the content out that she wants out there. So with her family, with the speaking events that she's doing, with the different philanthropic activities that she has going on, we're able to push what Elaine is doing, what she's passionate out into the community. Carrie, as you go through this digital transformation, how have your sort of measurements evolved? Can you talk about some of the knobs that you guys try to turn and we've seen these huge dashboards and there's so many different inputs. What do you guys focus on to drive your business? So that's a great question. We do have some specific key performance metrics that we're really focused on after this project with Oracle to see improvements on. So one such of course is conversion rate. We are slightly below the industry standard and so we're looking to about double our conversion rate over the course of the next year but then kind of going back to those engagement metrics. You know, we could be very focused on UPT and AOV but really it's important to me that our customer get to know who we are because I think that that's what's going to make her very loyal to the brand and become an advocate of the brand is when she really understands who Elaine Turner is and what we're about and like I said, we have a big philanthropic mission and so Elaine really sees fashion as her platform to do good for the community and so we want to make sure that our customers understand that and so I want to see our engagement metrics in terms of time on site. She's so tied to the brand. So creating that intimacy is really again another differentiator. So you talked about engagement metrics. How do you measure that sort of engagement? So I really want to see an improvement on time on site and page views and that I want our customers going deep into the website. So much further than just the homepage or even to a product page. I really want them jumping around and spending a lot of time. We have these new pages. They're some of our ancillary pages where we're really putting a lot of content and collaging things together between video and our lifestyle photography and photography of Elaine herself at events and so we want people to click through and just get lost in the website and spend a lot of time with us and even if it doesn't culminate in a purchase, that's okay. I just want them to be engaging with us and learning who we are. We're a small brand and so exposure is important at this stage in our growth cycle. Kerry, talk about the operational impact to your business, your day to day, day in the life of your role and your peers inside your company with Oracle Cloud. I can imagine doing deals, having the right inventory, knowing what's moving, what's not moving. That makes a lot of sense, that supply chain, kind of stuff. Is there other things that you guys have learned when you operationalized? Was it easy? Was there requirements? Was it heavy lifting? Obviously you were on the front end with the product team so you probably learned a lot with Oracle. Share your experience on how you guys operationalized it. Sure, I'm glad that you asked that question because Oracle has helped us integrate all of our systems and so being that we were a very small company, everything was very manual. Too manual and so it's allowed us to automate our processes and that's a really big deal because information is now flowing through automatically from when a customer places an order to going through our order management system and then out to our warehouse and then it all flows back whereas before it was all manual, copying and pasting painfully manual and so we're very excited about that and how it's going to enable us to streamline our processes and just run our business much more efficiently but then beyond that the platform itself is very customizable with all of the modules and widgets. We're able to build a new page that looks very customized and doesn't look templated on the fly almost. I got to ask you some philosophical questions because I just love this area of how the world's changing with technology. You know, we've seen a lot of demos in the high-tech world of holograms and like custom building, I think Levi's over a decade ago how you can make your own gene, custom fit. Is there thoughts around how you guys look at your customer engagement from a product building perspective? You know, virtual showrooms to interfacing with Elaine herself on product development and designs. Are there any thoughts there and how do you guys talk about that internally with creative geniuses? Yes, no, that's actually so interesting that you bring that up. I always think of Bonobos and how they have these stores where you don't actually buy the product and take it out with you, it's just to try it on and I think it's such an interesting concept. For us I think that one thing that we're interested in doing is actually having iPads in our stores and through those iPads we're actually doing a pilot program right now where we put them on all of our dressing rooms with the idea that a customer goes in, she's got some clothing, she's gonna try it on, but then once she gets into the dressing room she sees this iPad and she can watch a video where Elaine is telling her exactly how to style it and so we have a lot of styling tips out there and Elaine's shooting these videos. So now when the customer goes in there, I don't know if she's gonna sit and play on the iPad for hours but hopefully again we get her to stay in our store a little bit longer, learn how to style the product so we are exploring that. A hologram, hi Elaine, how does this look on me? That looks great on you, you should buy it. That's a great idea. Not yet ready for prime time but that's kind of the cool futuristic, when you've got a platform you can start doing things. You guys talking about developing stuff, like apps, are you looking at hiring developers at all? We are actually, we have an app on the roadmap for 2017 so it's something that we're in the very early stages of exploring and developing but we are looking at that and so. How about the brand strategy? Elaine's got sort of well known locally, sort of an icon within that little circle. Is the strategy to sort of grow that globally or do you want to stay sort of more niche oriented? Talk about that a little bit. So I think that for now we aren't looking to grow our brand globally. We do want to stay more state side right now but I think that we're in that growth phase right now and so it's really important that we grow the brand exposure and we need to bring in more customers who find out who we are and like I said, it is a lot more than just the product that we sell though we have very beautiful product that's all hand designed. It is important that we just get more traffic right now and so Oracle's going to help us do that because obviously there's a great search engine optimization engine that's already built into the platform so that'll help us sort of initially get more organic traffic but we're doing a lot more with customer acquisition and just trying to really get our name out there as much as possible. And as a small company, you know, you drive right down the elevator and it's like you get big banks, you get the big manufacturers, you're a small company. What's it like as a small company working with Oracle? Well, that's funny that you asked that. We've had such a great experience and that was one of our hesitations at first. There is that fear that we're just, we're nobody. You know, we're a small business and we've got this giant that is Oracle and that we won't be somebody that they'll not even a blip on the radar and actually we haven't experienced that at all. We worked so closely with the product development team and we've had such a voice in this entire process and being able to shape what the product is. And so I have felt so lucky that they really care about what we think and even if there's not something that, not a feature that we were able to have when we launched on Sunday, they have it on the roadmap for November and they said this will be in the next version. This will be in the next release for you guys. So they're really listening and paying attention to our business needs and they're focused on the small to mid-sized businesses which I was so surprised by. Kerry, I want to get your thoughts. I always love these examples. This is a small, medium-sized business Oracle Cloud and it works for you guys, it's great. What is the biggest learning that you've learned over this process and journey that's been magnified for you? Were you kind of puzzled about, wow, that's pretty cool. The biggest learning as far as the integration goes or? In general, the whole experience with Oracle to the deployment and the effect it's had for your business and the people that are working there. So every step has been really phenomenal, to be honest. The integration has gone really smoothly. Oracle's gone above and beyond to build out new workflows for us and new partnerships even. I mean, we basically provided them a list of all of our vendors and they have gone after those vendors specifically to develop relationships with so that it would help with our integration. So I've been so surprised with how much they have customized everything based and it's not just us. I've gotten a chance to meet with the other first adopters and it's been interesting to hear from them that their product is not the same as ours and their features are different from ours as well because Oracle has customized the product for each one of these first adopters. So none of us have the same platform. So it's just been a wonderful experience. So what you're taking on Oracle Open World? 60,000 people, they shut the streets in San Francisco down. What's your take? It's been overwhelming, but it's been amazing. I don't, we're small, small fish and all of this but it's been wonderful to people we've had an opportunity to meet and network with and I think that it will allow us to do so much more as we move into this next fiscal year. Kerry, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with Oracle and sharing some information and insights. It's been fantastic. I appreciate your time. And I'd love to see if I can get a little discount from my daughter. I was checking out the shoes looking great as well. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. This is theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. SiliconANGLE is the SiliconANGLE.com Publishing, SiliconANGLE.tv. That's our TV operations, theCUBE. And of course, Wikibon.com. That's our research team. We'll be back more here at Oracle Open World on Howard Street after this short break.