David Cantallops is the People Dept Director at Uterqüe, the premium brand of the Inditex group. We met in 2002 when we worked at Massimo Dutti, where he was Logistics HR Manager and I was Training & Development Manager. Since then, we have always worked together, in one way or another. We couldn’t agree more in how we understand HR: new ideas generators, empowered team inspirers, storytellers who help to create a business model through human values. David impersonates the profile of what HR should be in today’s companies: he naturally integrates operations, tactics and strategy, always inspiring and putting the internal customer in the middle.
1. Being the most exclusive Inditex brand, Uterqüe keeps its start-up soul. How do you achieve a personal HR style which could happily co-exist within a more corporate, transversal frame?
That’s the Inditex way of working, it’s not all down to me! Every Inditex brand is independent. We only receive a very practical guideline which sets an operational framework linking commercial and HR KPIs. From there, each brand develops its strategy. When I first joined Uterqüe 5 years ago, the first thing I saw was that every country where we were present had a different perception of what our client and leadership style meant to us. To build the community we wished to have, we needed to create an inspiring base for the new culture we wanted to introduce across the organisation. Inspired by the book “The Servant”, we started to work according to the service leadership style. In the book, the author talks about the gardener’s metaphor: you cannot force plants to grow, but you can create the right environment for them to do so. And that’s what we do, we serve our teams by creating the most suitable entourage for them. It’s mid-term work. The whole team has to believe in this culture and we transmit it in a way where everybody can see its coherence: from our behaviours to the demands we have. At Uterqüe, our job is to listen and genuinely develop our people, who are in the middle of everything. We are a department who helps. In the end, we surround ourselves by people who have the same purpose and style, who share the culture and transmit it in the same way: I coach you, I help you, I ask you. And this is what we do everywhere at Uterqüe.
2. Tell us what Uterqüe’s roadmap has been in the last 5 years and what the role of HR was in the whole process.
In 2013, the first assignment of the new management team was to re-shape our commercial space. We needed to close or relocate stores of the first expansion which were not profitable. This was a big learning process in my life. The People Department acted as a change facilitator. We managed to relocate all the co-workers who wanted to keep on developing themselves within the brand or at Inditex. We analysed case by case, what were the person’s needs and realities and what they really wanted to do. We helped our people to start a new life, and this was a success.
The next step was to consolidate the training and development toolkit for stores and support office which helped them to line up with the new philosophy.
Today, we have the stores and teams we dreamt of. What moves us is the fact that we help them to improve professionally (for example, with the programme “Be a product lover”), to consolidate and co-create new onboarding models with them to transmit our culture and detect new talents. As HR team, we enjoy inspiring change. Most recently, we’ve launched a process to redesign our organisation using Agile to empower our teams, optimise our resources and be very close to our start-up mind-set.
3. How do you apply Agile to create new scenarios and working realities?
When we started to meet to redefine our organisation, we followed the Arbinger Institute methodology (“The box”). It was a first and very important mind-set change from an emotional perspective. But we needed to find a practical, quick way to materialise what should be done. We carried out two workshops where, thanks to Agile, our teams devised their canvas, created their value proposition and key activities and, using SCRUM, they established how they will work to make their projects see the light before a given deadline. I am totally speechless with the results: our teams are fully empowered and self-organised. Their engagement and creativity bring the quality of their work to the next level. Agile helped us to put individuals in the middle with a non-paternalistic approach. Our message is very clear: I believe in you, I help you, I give you the power to decide. You design your role and your environment and, therefore, you design the company.
4. Most of the Uterqüe team work in the many stores the brand has across the globe. How do you manage to line up store teams and those working in the support studio? How can you successfully transmit a common purpose?
At Inditex everybody is naturally store-oriented. Stores fully determine our operations and for the whole support studio team it’s crystal clear that they work at our stores’ service. In Uterqüe’s case, even our General Manager has a store background, so we have all experienced this field very closely. Internal promotion is a crucial factor. Our stores are our main talent pool when it’s about finding potential to cover support studio vacancies. Both worlds mingle constantly. Regional teams play a starring role when transmitting culture and values. They are the ones who make sure our philosophy is shared and understood across our worldwide teams. Stores and operations are at the heart of our work.
5. How does Uterqüe integrate both offline and online stores?
Our online store started to operate in 2011. In that moment, offline stores felt threatened. “It will steal my sales and it will be impossible to hit our targets”, complained brick and mortar. They didn’t even see online as part of Uterqüe! Since then, we decided to work according to a hybrid retail model (we do not call it “omnichannel”). We do not differentiate between online or offline teams, just the opposite: we make both merge. Everything is Uterqüe. For example, Russia’s product manager will work with the whole country depending on its customer’s and market’s need, regardless of the channel. Offline stores have an iPod through which they can use the online store as a stockroom, so they can sell a product which is not physically available in their store but online. It does not matter who is selling the product. What really matters is that Uterqüe does it. By integrating both online and offline worlds, both complement each other. Online represents 12% of Uterqüe’s total turnover, but 14% of this percentage is achieved thanks to the iPod sales done from the brick and mortar stores. It has been such a revelation to work like this and our teams are completely lined up. Our opening in China thanks to Tmall is another example that both on and off work together to help the brand to achieve its goals.
Many thanks for opening your doors and sharing your experience, David!
