Cyberspace Brand Mastery - Remo-style

High above a windy city, early one morning in December at the offices of the NSW Department of State and Regional Development, FMCA members rubbed shoulders with members of Fashion Group International to hear about brand building and internet marketing. Stewart White reports.

It was the FMCA's toe-in-the water for a breakfast business seminar and an inaugural association with the Australian chapter of Fashion Group International (FGI). State and Regional Development's Paul Judge welcomed the breakfasters and warmed them up with facts like 81% of Australian businesses and 58 % of the population were Internet connected.

He was followed by the stylish President of the FGI, Claudia Chan Shaw, who introduced keynote speaker Remo Giuffre, who has been described as "Australia's most creative shopkeeper". She gave a snapshot of Remo's transition from his audacious iconic 80s landmark "general" store in Darlinghurst, to today's "virtual" general store, conveniently available at any time on your nearest computer screen.

According to Remo, his brave eponymous store venture was best summed up by his Sicilian mother: "Darling, you have three degrees . . . and you have opened a shop?!" He told of his dream - from the fun of the halcyon days of the landmark concept store, to its heartbreaking closure when he could find no-one with the appetite or pockets to back it, through to today's thriving "website, warehouse and word of mouse".
After four years working in New York and Silicon Valley, the online Remo store was born, rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of the cool and quirky general store. Going 'live' in March 2000, the new Remo was developed as an almost intuitive global community and virtual general store from the outset. Today it has 10,830 online customers in 81countries, representing a 100% growth in the year to date.

Remo referred to the website's birth as "the gathering", where he sought orphaned  customers from the old store and the days of its award-winning catalogue. Originally the store had had a mailing list of 100,000, and of those, 90 had email addresses. From what was still current of those 90 and through a targeted Avant Card campaign designed to gather old customers, he  now has 10,830 devoted customers' addresses. They are all part of the Remo community that benignly plays an integral role in Remo's direction and product development.

Treating those at the breakfast to a "peek under the bonnet", he showed the intricate architecture of his Network Model's website, where everyone is interconnected in an inside-out approach to customer relations. "The smart thing to do is to have smart customers, and have an online community of thinkers," he said. Within the model, paths and channels interconnect to give a living blueprint of business intelligence - feedback - telegraph to customers - network - word of mouth - evangelical customers. This is a true virtual community were people can - and do - interact with each other. Customers can find each other on the site at the cafe/lab area. But, importantly, in the two-way flow of information they can influence Remo product development.

Remo knows how many dog vs cat people he has, whether blue would be a better colour in shirts than white, how many Elvis vs Beatles fanciers he has. With this knowledge, he is constantly communicating, involving customers, telegraphing thoughts and conceptual products in what he describes as the "getting of wisdom". Big Brother is a bespectacled and ebullient shopkeeping webmaster of Sicilian heritage. In describing his philosophy on brand equity, he outlined his "Brand Soup - and the elements that make your brand taste different".

"Merchandise is the glue that sticks the community together," he said."Everything matters, God is in the detail." And that's from a man who champions Splayds - shamelessly selling them around the globe. "Can't to wrong with a set of Splayds!" he says. At the end of the breakfast it had become very clear that, from the outset, Remo had been an online brand before there was an online.