I met Lucas 4 years ago, right when he was just stepping into his position as Retail, People & Culture Manager at Brownie, the brand founded by his parents. Thanks to Lucas I discovered my now admired Zygmunt Bauman and I had the chance to know from the inside a brand full of purpose and authenticity.
In a time when retail will have to be rethought to keep on being relevant, Lucas talks about what makes Brownie so special as a brand.
1. What’s the history of Brownie?
To understand Brownie we need to know its founders’ personal stories.
Juan Morera, my father, belonged to a family from Terrassa (the heart of textile industry in Catalonia) with a long textile heritage. He used to manufacture polo shirts, t-shirts and trousers for his own shop (Dos Passos) as well as for other brands (Ibiza Republic). In those times, the shops Juan opened showcased that genuine vintage style: old wooden furniture, world balls, maps, sail-boats replica, antique radios, etc. It was his personal touch.
Mercedes Ortega, my mother, was born in Barcelona. Her family, originally from the South of Spain, moved to the city in the 40s. Her aunties were seamstresses and tailors and Mercedes learnt that job. When she was 18, she spent some time in London where, besides learning English, she found out how crucial impeccable customer service is. Back in Barcelona, she opened her first boutique in the iconic Camello, a fashion galleria in Portaferrissa Street, downtown Barcelona. Afterwards, she opened new branches in Boulevard Rosa (Passeig de Gràcia) and La Avenida (Rambla Catalunya), both important fashion meeting points out of business nowadays.
My brother and I, we both have our childhood memories definitely bond to my mother’s boutiques. I remember spending m y time sitting in one of the fitting rooms of the Boulevard boutique, reading my Mortadelo y Filemón comics, having my afternoon snack at the bar nearby and waiting for my mother to finish the day and go back home together.
Few years after my sister Mar was born, my parents found a business opportunity targeting the youngest niche of clients. They never had been working together before this project. In 2006, our dog Brownie joined our family and, few months after that, the new boutique bared its name. The public response was so positive that my parents decided to open new branches across Barcelona. How did those boutiques look like? Small, cosy and 100% focused on personalized customer service. Juan’s speciality was to devise warm, eclectic and dreamy spaces at the same time he coordinated product manufacturing. Mercedes was in charge of the collection design. With the increasing number of boutiques, Brownie widened its target, product categories and clientele. However, pullovers remained our signature products.
In 2011 we opened our first boutique in Madrid, at Lagasca Street. It was a tiny space, but with the perfect location. We exported the same formula: quality product, personal service and authenticity. The rest is history. Along these 14 years we have been through different phases: external general managers, partnership with El Corte Inglés, first openings in Portugal and, well, the construction of the Brownie phenomenon across Spain and Portugal. The sad note of this story is that Juan Morera, our founder, passed away in 2016. He is our emotional driver now and we are on a personal mission to make Brownie the kind of brand Juan wanted it to be: authentic and emotionally bond to its clients. Since 2018 Juan Morera Jr is our General Manager and he steers the next steps of our expansion. Mercedes is the company’s Chairperson and creative director and she manages a team of 6 designers.
2. What are the tangible and intangible elements that make Brownie what it actually is?
Regarding tangible elements, I would say one of the most remarkable aspects is that all our boutiques are unique, including our shop-in-shop at El Corte Inglés. They all have unique furniture: mid-century tables, counters used in old bakeries to prepare bread dough, world balls of all sorts, antique radios, spectacular maps, traditional Barcelona’s Eixample blinds used as fitting-room doors, etc. Our boutiques catch our clients’ attention. In this sense, we follow Juan’s vision regarding cosy layouts and decoration. An ecosystem of experienced craftspeople helps us to recycle antique pieces of furniture we source in markets, since we want to keep to a minimum the industrial production to preserve our brands’ authenticity. On the other hand, we put all our love in developing our collections, not only regarding qualities, but also model designing. To us, the perfect fit and softness of our clothes is a must. Therefore we devote plenty of time and effort to achieve it.
As per intangible aspects, I believe that something that makes us so unique is our ability as a brand, but above all as a team, to create a shopping experience which is second to none thanks to the emotional bond with our clients. 40% of our clientele is very young, so we try they find in our boutiques a relaxing moment, but at the same time we also want them to find a time to reconnect with their moms and friends at Brownie. That’s why it’s crucial for us that our sales teams are able to create that special scenario allowing mothers and daughters to enjoy their time together. Mothers of our younger clients are 30% of our sales. Brownie is nowadays a brand addressed to women of all ages having a young soul. We thrive to make that energy and freshness a global value across our boutique teams.
3. People, product, operations. What’s the role of each one at Brownie?
It’s obvious these three elements are closely interconnected. Regarding people, we usually say we are a pure family business. Even if sometimes I might hear the sentence “be careful, the company has to get more professional”, I strongly believe only the family can pamper and fight for the company the way we do. At our support studio we have a team of 40 awesome professional people coming from the most important Spanish fashion brands who helped us to implement procedures and to make our company the wonderful company it is. Energy, creativity and commitment define the way we work in our day to day. Our product is 100% designed at our premises. It can be easily identified, it’s very us: always looking for trends and fashion, but at the same time our collections have to be very commercial, easy to sell and, above all, easy to wear. To understand what our clientele needs, we need to be very close, so we thrive to keep an open channel of communication between our clients and our product team. Who better than our sales team to play this role? Talking about operations, we count on a very useful app we use to detect the commercial instinct in our boutique teams and to collect our clientele opinions about the product. Thanks to this information, we are able to structure our collections in a better way and to empower our field teams by giving them a relevant role in product-related decisions.
Moreover, 4 years ago we implemented RFID in our boutiques and central warehouse. Thanks to that we can keep better control of our inventory, which helped us to introduce omnichannel in our business strategy.
4. Your client is your fan. How do you achieve this?
I believe the key word here is emotion. To transmit emotion we have to be open, fresh and able to communicate very well. How can a company behave like this, if we are talking about human features? Well, maybe the secret it’s about making the company more human by bringing it closer to the client. Thanks to our social network we are in touch with our clientele and we really listen what they tell us! Our clients give us precious initiatives we adopt. We want them to see we pay attention to their comments. We use a wide toolkit to create this relationship with our clients (gift cards, challenges, social contents) and, most important, we use our attitudes. On one hand, we have procedures, operations, data and strategy definition. On the other hand, we have our teams attitudes, which are essential to understand our success and the Brownie fan phenomenon: they are enthusiastic, positive and totally identified with the brand. Remember that, in fashion retail, your sales teams are your main ambassadors. That’s why it’s a must to take care of them, work hand in hand with them and give them full support in their daily work. Their positive vibes are the key to create a clients’ community. We work to foster these positive vibes since we are a brand which wants to make people happy. If we can bring happiness to our daughters, mothers, aunties, nieces and grannies!, then we are accomplishing our mission.
5. In these complex times where we will need to use our creativity more than ever, which are the triggers fashion retail could activate to offer new ideas?
Maybe it sounds obvious, but it’s time to focus on our clients: we have to offer authentic purpose and attitudes and unique shopping experiences to weave an emotional bond. Our only reason to exist is that our clients believe in us.
On top of that, we will have to be more agile when taking decisions, more innovative when creating procedures and more human than ever before with our teams and clients.
Many thanks for such an inspiration, Lucas!
