The Interview: Rasmus Brix, UK and Ireland Managing Director of Pandora

Danish jewellery brand Pandora needs little introduction. Known internationally for its charm bracelets, the UK and Ireland is today its second biggest market toady with the brand seeing huge opportunity still for growth. 

As Rasmus Brix, General Manager for the UK & Ireland, explains, the size of the jewellery in the market is quite “mind blowing”, with almost half of women in the UK and Ireland owning a Pandora piece of jewellery.

In this interview Rasmus talks about Pandora’s most recent collaboration with film studio Marvel, which generated no less than 3% of revenues in the first quarter of 2022, why physical retail is so important for the company and what future plans he has for the UK.

I don't think Pandora needs much of an introduction, but could you expand on its UK and Ireland operations? I believe we are your second biggest market.

You're absolutely right, the UK and Ireland is the second biggest market right after North America, which is our biggest commercial operation. So, it's a very important market for the group - we operate about 240 stores here.

The vast majority (about 90%) we operate ourselves and the remainder is run by franchise partners. And then we have a quite sizeable e-commerce business as well - about a third of our sales come through e-commerce. It's a big business and a very strong brand, we know that almost half of women in the UK and Ireland own a Pandora piece of jewellery - it's absolutely mind blowing.

A Pandora store shopfront.

You've also recently announced that you're focusing even more on the UK by investing in talent for the marketing, digital and technology sectors. That sounds like another really big vote of confidence in the market.

Our performance right now is extremely strong. We just announced the results for the first quarter a few weeks ago and we grew more than 30%, both compared to 2021 and 2019. A big part of pushing that performance forward is going to be enriching our experience online with a more personalised and data-driven approach, so loads of good things happening.

And we expect to attract between 20 and 30 world-leading data scientists, digital marketeers and so forth into the UK Hub, hopefully within the 12 to 18 months.

One thing that really struck me is the success of your Marvel collaboration, which launched in February, and made up 3% of the business in those first three months of the year. That's kind of a huge deal, right?

It is a very big number and what's remarkable about it is that it's very few products. And that is the strength of the Pandora brand, once we get a couple of products right they just fly out of the stores, and Marvel was one of those. So, we have what we call the big volume driving collaborations, which includes Marvel, and in the past, we’ve done Star Wars, Harry Potter, Disney.

All of these are discrete universes where we know there’s a great deal of overlap between those fans and the fans of Pandora. And then we are embarking on more of what we call fashion collaborations, for which we dip into the fashion and arts universes. You haven't seen much from us there yet, but just a bit of cliff hanger - there might be something coming in that space soon.

An image of Pandora's Marvel collaboration.

When you say they just fly off the shelf - I have to think of the Infinity Gauntlet Ring, which had a waiting list of 157,000 people when I checked.

It is absolutely insane and it really caught us by surprise. To be honest we completely under-forecasted it. We get supplies and about 24 hours after they're gone. We just can't keep up with it. So, it's great news and it's also a bit of a challenge to get some of these best sellers right, because we did not see that one coming.

I'd love to know a bit more about your background, before we start talking about your stellar rise at Pandora. What is there to tell me?

I've always had a huge passion for leadership. When I think back even when I was 13, working at the local McDonalds, I've always put myself in situations where I had some sort of responsibility for leading teams. Before I started at Pandora, I was a strategy consultant with a company that is now part of Bain and Company. I worked there for five years advising different clients from different backgrounds – in consumer goods, retail, telecommunications, I did financial services, loads of different things - but always the strategy and commercial front-end of the business. And that was also my road into Pandora because the Head Office in Copenhagen needed a VP of Strategy and Business Development.

Can you just tell us maybe a bit about your position now? You are the general manager for the UK in Ireland, what does a normal week look like for you?

Monday is typically about last week's performance, we look at all the different parts of the commercial operations and figure out what happened and then most importantly, what we should do this week and in the coming weeks.

Then between Tuesday and Thursday I typically do three things – I have meetings around project strategy development and new initiatives, but I also spend time just catching up with my team on the trends they see in Italy for example that we might leverage, and what ideas they have in the US that we can learn from. Then the last bit would be store visits. I like to spend anywhere between half a day to a day in stores during a week.

Friday is typically around recapping the week, and understanding if there’s anything we need to adapt for the weekend and also planning for the next week.

I think it’s very interesting that you make store visits such a priority. Why do you do these visits and what do you look for when you do them?

I would like to do three times more than I actually do, to be honest. I've never done a store visit and came back thinking that it wasn't worth the time. So first of all, it's just to get to know the people that work there. Secondly, it's where you find to the truth - it’s where you go to find out why something works, or why something doesn’t work.

Smart people can have a tendency to sit behind a desk and analyse, but more often than not I could walk five minutes to the Oxford Circus or Marble Arch stores and talk to the store associates and they typically have two, three ideas or good answers. And they are almost always right.

Most importantly, it's also where you get input on all the things you think about in the office. You might thing this is a smart feature, but in-store it might not work. It's a way of getting inspiration and being relevant and being where the customer is.

How was that impacted by the pandemic? A lot of your business must now be online as well?

Our colleagues in the store - they love the brand and the product, and as a customer you get a super authentic, really engaged conversation. It's very tricky to replicate that online. Where the two channels can learn from each other, and I definitely think they can, is in a couple of different ways. But for example, when we have a product that doesn't work online, we typically then go into store and ask how it is performing there, and what are the sales arguments? And typically, it's because the product needs a certain explanation, and then we take that knowledge and we put it into our messaging online and then sometimes that improves the performance.

Which channel do you prefer? You talk a lot about physical retail and that seems like a passion of yours.

Truth be told I have the luxury that I don't care, I want the customer to shop where she wants to shop and that's a very good place to be in. Having said that, I'm a firm believer in physical retail. We run around 240 stores in the UK and Ireland and we can see if we close a store in the area that the e-commerce sales in that area also drop.

So the store is a sales channel but it's also a marketing channel. We have times of the year where e-commerce is 50% of all the sales and we have times of the year where it's 25% or less. So it's a reflection of different times of the year but also of what the customer would like to do and that always changes.

What can you tell us about the future for the UK?

There’s a huge amount of potential in the UK. There are still loads of new customers out there who think our products super attractive and who really want to engage with us. And that’s despite the size of the business today, I mean we sell 12 million pieces of jewellery in this market every year, which is just amazing.

I am focusing on investing in the brand and in retail spaces. You're not going to see me open 5,000 stores here, but there are places where we could have a presence where we don't today. I'm also focused on investing in our people. We have about 2,500 - 3,000 colleagues in our stores and if I can invest more in their wellbeing and skills, in the long term that’s going to drive growth. So, I'm quite positive about the outlook for the UK.