The Leading Lady: Phenomenal CX Through Personification

INTRO:

You're listening to CX Confessions brought to you by Khoros. In each episode, we’ll share the customer experience stories and insights you need — straight from the sharpest minds in CX — to better connect with your customers and create customers for life. Let's start the show.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Hello and welcome to CX Confessions. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Katherine Calvert, Chief Marketing Officer for Khoros.

SPIKE JONES:

And I’m Spike Jones, I work in Services, but you're not here to listen to me, you are here to listen to our fabulous guests that we have today. Katherine, who is this gentleman?

KATHERINE CALVERT:

I am so excited, Spike, to introduce you and everybody to Mr. Patrick Herning. He is founder and CEO of 11 Honoré, one of the most innovative and provocative luxury brands out there. It is serving the plus size community and making headlines while they do it. He is also more recently the co-founder and CEO of Thirteen Loon, which is an incredible new online virtual beauty business focused on black- and brown-owned businesses. So, he's here to share his stories with us today and boy, does he have some great ones. So, welcome to the show, Patrick Herning.

PATRICK HERNING:

Thanks Katherine, thanks Spike. It's great to be here. Appreciate the invitation.

SPIKE JONES:

Absolutely. So, we spoke last week getting ready for this, and thanks for joining us then, and you were just about to launch a new collaboration — 11 Honoré was about to launch a new collaboration with Lena Dunham. Saw some of the press, read the New York Times article, which is awesome. How is that being received and launched on into the world with your customers?

PATRICK HERNING:

It was, is, remains a very exciting partnership. Like all good partnerships, it evolved over time. What you didn't read is really the evolution of the conversation. It started with Lena actually pitching me on a brand she wanted to do and that evolved over time, and I believe winter of ‘19, end of ‘19 we were in London. We had dinner. And that's when I told her she should just partner with us as she's getting her, getting her fashion feet wet as it were. She could get to market faster.

At that point, we had vertically integrated. At that point, we had vertically integrated in our private label manufacturing capabilities, so we were able to be a one-stop shop for her and that part of the story is interesting, because what I like to do is create conversation. What I like to do is start a conversation and Lena certainly has done that.

From a commercial perspective — best thing the company has ever done. We had our largest full-priced selling week, the last week of launch, which is super exciting. Really proud of the fit and the price point. But look, by design, Lena is polarizing, and, you know, I have an intimate birds-eye-view into who she is as a person, certainly developed a very close friendship over the years. We share sobriety in common. And I have a tremendous amount of respect, more so now than certainly when I started this a week ago, with people in the public eye, and you really do open yourself up for criticism. And by default, through this partnership, I certainly opened myself up to criticism. The company opened itself up for criticism, but look fashion is meant to be polarizing. Fashion is meant to create conversation, dialogue, whether it be positive or negative and through social media, you know, the customer and community had an opportunity to speak their truth, all of which I listened to and read, and I'm proud of it. I love what we did together. It's 80% sold out within a week, which again is an incredible sell-through data point for us as a brand and a retailer.

So all in all, to answer your question very long-windedly, it was great.

SPIKE JONES:

That was awesome. One of my favorite little snippets in the article, in the Times article was how she — her approach on fashion and how sometimes it should reflect what's going on in your head. So sometimes it should be messy and all over the place and other times it should be very put together, and that was something I had actually never thought about too. So even just that small little snippet in that take kind of shows her view of the world in the partnership, which is great.

PATRICK HERNING:

I also think what it touched on — whether people could relate to it or not or were put off by it or not — was her evolution with her own self acceptance with her own normal size body. I don't call Lena plus size necessarily, she's a fourteen/sixteen size, size fourteen being the standard size in the US, so that's a normal size body. But Lena has been anywhere from a four/six to fourteen/sixteen and that evolution to me was very interesting and her experience as a straight sized woman on the cover of Vogue, on red carpets being slammed back then for being too big, now in a different size body and her evolution of self love and then self acceptance, and you know that, that, that put a lot of people off. You know, people, you know there were times Lena, did not align with being called plus size. Well, she shouldn't have been. She was a four or six.

And so as she's evolved and grown and again, as I said on this journey of self acceptance, I do think ultimately the authenticity which I'm sure we’ll talk about today resonates and it ultimately is validated by the fact that it's almost sold out.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

And so when you mean, I think you said “by design,” you started working with Lena because of polarizing, but I think implicit in that — you chose her because she is a truth-teller. Whether you agree or disagree with her point of view on a particular truth, that is her truth, right, and her journey has been about sharing that. And I think the that notion of what you talked about where fourteen is the average size, but the the genesis of 11 Honoré was that high end fashion designers weren't even going up to size twelve or fourteen, and so how do you, you know when you think about how do you answer, how do you bring that authentic experience to your customer, whether Lena resonates with all of them or not, what I've seen you do with your business is tell those stories.

PATRICK HERNING:

Yeah look, we, we, the proverbial “we” being 11 Honoré, has been an advocate for this customer from day one and some of the backlash of Lena — let’s just table Lena for the time being, because that's neither here nor there — is the size range, right. We stopped at twenty six. But that's not the point and my comment is the price point. And what we have always strived to do at 11 is create an entirely new product offering that this customer has never had access to before. So I will gladly take heat on price. Fair enough. People are allowed to have their own opinions on that, but there are many brands out there that are fast fashion that are sold at Target, that are sold at Torrid, that are sold at Lane Bryant that are a much more affordable price bracket. But that's not what we set out to do.

We set out to offer her designer product that historically had never been offered to her before. So that we have done successfully and whether she is in a position to purchase now, whether it's something she wants to do down the road or even if it's something she's not necessarily ever interested in, fashion is meant to be aspirational and she should have access, regardless of where she is on her fashion journey. And that's what 11 Honoré does.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

And you're talking about “she,'' you're talking about your customer. You talk about her like she's in the room with you. Tell us about that. That's where we've seen brands be so successful is when they treat that customer as a person. How is it, how has your customer become so real to you, to your company? What does that look like?

PATRICK HERNING:

It’s interesting. I mean prior to 11 Honoré, outside of an assignment I worked on for Marina Rinalde, which is the only elevated plus size brand globally in the market, I didn't know “her,” but very quickly I fell in love with her, right, and getting to know the challenges she's experienced first hand, right, as I was developing the business plan and having round table conversations, intimate conversations and dialogue about how the fashion landscape as we know — at how it has treated her, how it has made her feel when she walks in traditional brick and mortar stores, and just a tremendous amount of empathy for what an upsetting experience that must have been and continues to be.

But what I wanted to do and what 11 Honoré has done is create a new retail experience for her. And through this journey of entrepreneurship and raising capital and failing and failing and failing, you can't do all of that unless you are passionate about who you're serving. And even through the Lena discourse, both positive and negative, it's like, I will always show up for her, even if she doesn't agree with what we're doing, because that's my job, is to advocate and to push boundaries and create change, and sometimes people will like it. Sometimes people won't. But I will never give up on trying to continue presenting opportunities, brands, capsules, what have you, that push the boundaries.

SPIKE JONES:

Yeah, I love the, the personification like she's in the room. I mean that is something that I've, I've worked with a lot of brands and that's very, very rare. And so that's a really cool practice to speak like she's always in the room too because you're going to, you're going to, it kind of shines a whole a different light on things for sure.

PATRICK HERNING:

And one thing we do internally — we don't speak about this externally, though it's certainly not a secret — is, our internal language around our customer — she's the leading lady. And when you think of traditional romcom films, the leading lady is a very specific profile and through our act of disruption and innovation, it's flipping the script on what that profile looks like, and our customer is the leading lady, which I think is a cool way to explain her.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

How do you connect these leading ladies to each other? How do you create community when there is no in-person retail experience?

PATRICK HERNING:

Well, you have to remember this started back in 2017, so I think, as a digital-first platform, part of what you do is create digital community, right, because it's not the ‘80s where you have to go to like a store on Union Square in San Francisco to have retail therapy and camaraderie, right. It all happens digitally.

And so a huge piece of our digital community was about our visual asset storytelling. So, prior to 11 Honoré, you know, the category didn't exist, right, designer plus sizes didn’t exist, and so, as a result of creating this entirely new product offering, we created an entirely new way to tell a story through our digital, virtual, our digital assets, our marketing assets.

And so again it was Vogue designers, Vogue lighting, Vogue photographers creating an entirely elevated visual asset for her to really and authentically be celebrated in. And so I think, just that visual storytelling created, we created a lot of community around that and then obviously, at the end of the day I’m just an events girl, right, like love me an event, love me a forty-person fashion dinner, and so as quickly as we could, which started a month or two after launch, we were assembling community all over the United States.

SPIKE JONES:

Now, now Patrick, you know, you champion a lot of innovation, especially in this industry, but there's also, just like every industry, there's also these, you know, “This is the way we always do it,” sort of thing. So what is a commonly held practice or belief in your industry that you violently oppose.

PATRICK HERNING:

It is interesting you're asking that question. Well, I mean there's so many things I violently oppose about the archaic fashion industry and, and their herd mentality and their actual lack of innovation. In terms of this customer, right, but sort of assuming that’s table stakes right, it took a long time for people to like, get on board with this, that I vehemently disagree with, but in a post-COVID, or as restrictions are lifting and we're entering this new, this new world of ours, what I learned and my takeaway from the lockdown was traditional retail as we know it is struggling and we are just a variable in that broken equation.

So, in order for us to emerge stronger, we had to reimagine how we looked at inventory. And that reimagination is what I think our next phase of growth will really be rooted in. And as the board said to me, “We’re no longer paying people to sell their clothes.” And like when you think of that, right, you think of that as a business model: we pay you to sell your clothes. Like we're no longer doing that. So we've completely reimagined our inventory strategy and how we're going to continue to engage her with newness and because of our deep-rooted footprint in this category, and with this customer, I'd say 90% of the brands that we have reimagined our inventory strategies with are moving forward with us in this new innovative way, right. And that to me is what's most exciting.

So it's not so much a negative, it's like this is broken. Retail’s broken. Everybody’s saddled with inventory, COVID just shined a spotlight on it. So in order to mitigate that risk, what can you do differently. And 2021 forward is all about doing things differently.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Well so and to build on that, Patrick, when you think about 2021 and moving ahead to reimagine the economics of retail, you’ve really got to know that customer so well. Like when you think about data and knowing your customer, what's the most important piece of data for you as a business around your customer?

PATRICK HERNING:

Size, fit integrity, size and fit integrity, sort of go one-and-one, and price point. You know we, by design again, we do not set out to be all things to everybody from a pricing perspective. You know. Brand being my background, you know launching with high-end luxury designer price points was absolutely the strategy, knowing over time, we would democratize the site from a pricing perspective. Again giving her what she never had before, but making it as approachable, as aspirational, as possible without recreating the wheel of what's already been put into the market.

And so that piece, that fit integrity, that really understanding the size. And then how are you then wrapping that all up in assortment and merchandising, that is fundamental. And for us it's been trial and error, because again nobody had done this before so as a result of doing it for the first time, the industry, the brands we carried, ourselves were very much building the plane while we were flying it.

And so now four years in, vertically integrated, able to bring to market our own brand, tapping into size, fit, price, it's now the perfect storm, and again sort of looking at life pre-COVID, post-COVID, not only did we reimagine our inventory strategy, we reimagined our distribution footprint. So we're truly omni, kind of 2021 forward. I would say confidentially, but I'm on a podcast, so I'm not going to say that, but we have a very exciting partnership with Nordstrom Q3 that is going to support our mission in dressing as many women as possible through the lens of our own brand, the 11 Honoré collection.

SPIKE JONES:

It sounds like a lot of external and internal metrics coming together for sure. So it is called, the podcast is called CX confessions. So it is confessions time and we would love to ask you and here what is the hardest lesson that you have learned on this journey with your customer, with her.

PATRICK HERNING:

The answer to that question probably changes when it's asked and I'm sure it's been asked of me before, but in this moment my best answer is you can't make everybody happy. And under the hood, the thought, the intention, the hope for peace, love, and happiness is — as a consummate people pleaser — accepting the fact that you are going to piss people off. You just are, and that's okay, right. That's absolutely okay. And learning to sort of accept that, that's taken a lot of time because I come from the agency side and your job is to not disappoint. Your job is to exceed expectations. Your job is to over-deliver, over-index and when you talk about an entire category of customers, that's an impossibility. Like you can't make everybody happy, but I sure as hell try.

SPIKE JONES:

Yeah I'm a recovering agency guy myself, and so, and as a marketer, I always thought, especially when after social came out and was out for a while, like who do I market to? Do I market to the offline person or do I market to that person who can sit, hide behind a screen and tell me things they would never say to my face. And always it’s like it's a mix of both, I guess. I don’t know, I haven't figured it out.

PATRICK HERNING:

But I did get some good advice once and I've had some very soul crushing experiences the last four years just in life, and work, and business, and it's hard. But somebody once told me, “You got to take it all with a grain of salt, and that includes the praise,” right, because you can't sit there and be celebrated by the New York Times and Vogue and then not have the discourse on the other end, right. And you got to take the good with the bad and you sort of net out somewhere in the middle and at the end of the day you can only do your best and that is never called into question, right, like when I go to bed at night. I never question, did I do my best? Did I try my hardest? Did I think through this as many ways as possible?

And I had one investor, Medha Agarwal at Redpoint, and she taught me the most valuable lesson which you, Spike, will appreciate as an agency guy, is like it's okay to fail, and that was a new language to me, right, like that is like the F-word, are you kidding me? No. And, and she would say to me and she was super young, you know Harvard MBA, the typical sort of San Francisco venture archetype, but she said I watch you in meetings and it's like when we get to the uncomfortable data, it's like you want to just move through it. You want to just get through it. She's like, that's where you learn, right, and just because you have bad metrics doesn't mean you're a bad person. Just because you fail doesn't mean your business is going to fail. It's like, fail forward, fail fast, fail forward, fail fast, and it's interesting, because I never, like, that is so true, and now, you know, I'll be on calls, and I can see how it dismantles people, it disarms them. It's like, okay, well we're failing, so why? Why is this failing? And people take it personally. I certainly can take it personally. But it's not it's just it's just facts. It's like this isn't working, it doesn't mean you're not working, it doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea. It just means that we're failing so, let's learn from this and like we're going to mess something up again like for sure but like let's just not mess this one up again.

And that process of iterating and iterating and iterating, and then you don't get hung in the muck and you don't get discouraged. You, look, that failed. So, let's move on, let’s try something else.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Well, and I think that that requires creating a culture of trust where you're setting the example where it, where you can say, you're fine, but when people see it in action and there's accountability in what we started talking about with authenticity, right, just nobody has all the answers and when you free a team to embrace the idea that, if you don't try anything you're never going to grow, then you create a culture that fosters innovation, right, and failure’s part of that. So, speaking of authentic and connections and being real, we want to wrap up the podcast, Patrick, after this scintillating conversation with a little bit about you, because we believe authenticity starts with the person. So we have a new thing that we call quick-fire confessions. Five questions to let us get a glimpse of the real Patrick Herning. All right are you ready? We're going to go back and forth. Spike, why don’t you kick us off?

SPIKE JONES:

Oh, First Concert. No pressure. No pressure.

PATRICK HERNING:

U2

SPIKE JONES:

Oh, damn, that's a good one!

KATHERINE CALVERT:

So much cooler than my Howard Jones concert. First job ever?

PATRICK HERNING:

Cash wrap at the Polo Ralph Lauren store my senior year of high school over holiday.

SPIKE JONES:

Where it all began.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Could he still wrap a good gift? He can actually.

PATRICK HERNING:

Didn't get promoted.

SPIKE JONES:

Fair enough. What profession, other than your own, would you attempt if you could?

PATRICK HERNING:

I don't know if it's my profession? No, this, this is a fair answer. I'm obsessed with Jet Suite X, and if I wasn't doing this, I would want to go be the CMO of JSX. I think it's an incredible product.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Okay.

SPIKE JONES:

Fair enough!

KATHERINE CALVERT:

What is your favorite app on your phone?

PATRICK HERNING:

You're gonna think I’m a total nerd, but I love the weather app.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Which weather app?

PATRICK HERNING:

I don't know, the one that comes on the phone.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Comes on the phone [laughs].

SPIKE JONES:

All right. There's so many these days. Carrot is a good one if you haven't checked it out. And finally, what is your biggest indulgence?

PATRICK HERNING:

My biggest indulgence is taking the morning. And it's not leisurely because I have to own it often times by getting up very early, but I do not start my day, like I don't get out of bed and start my day. I take a solid ninety minutes before I'm street legal.

SPIKE JONES:

Street legal [laughs].

KATHERINE CALVERT:

But what is that? What happens when you “take a morning”?

PATRICK HERNING:

It starts with usually taking Baxter out, my Nespresso almond milk latte, I'm an avid Kundalini meditator so I have mantras playing in the background, check sales, New York Times, LA Times, Business of Fashion, WWD, start texting, but I'm in my bed. I'm chilling in my bed.

KATHERINE CALVERT:

Yeah that doesn't sound like it's just daydreaming, but okay, still in bed, all right. Well, thank you for sharing that with us and thank you for sharing your stories with us and for joining us for CX confessions. Patrick Herning, you've been a marvelous guest and we are so excited to share your stories, and for anybody who wants to learn more about his incredible brands, you can check out 11 Honoré or Thirteen Loon for amazing experiences and really pioneering approach to expanding inclusion in retail and beauty. So thank you, Patrick, thanks for being here and thanks for joining us.

PATRICK HERNING:

Thank you for having me.

KHOROS:

Your customers expect to be understood — their likes and dislikes, their history with your brand, and their communication preferences. But so many companies struggle to connect the dots of the interaction across their own teams and channels and its creating customer experience challenges and disasters. That's where Khoros can help. Khoros is the award winning customer engagement platform built to turn those siloed interactions with your customer into enterprise value. Khoros works with more than 2,000 of the world's leading brands and powers more than 500 million digital interactions every day. Khoros is the award-winning platform for digital-first customer engagement. Ready to create human connection across the digital customer experience to create customers for life? Learn more at Khoros.com.

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