The Drum’s Daily Briefing: Dr Martens needs revitalization and Superdry seeks salvation

The company expects its wholesale revenue in the US in 2025 to be down by double-digits year-on-year, denting overall profits.

“The FY25 outlook is challenging and the whole organization is focused on our action plan to reignite boots demand, particularly in the USA, our largest market,” said Kenny Wilson, who is planning to step down after six years running the firm.

The task of turning around the company, whose shoes have been a counterculture staple since the 1960s, will fall to chief brand officer Ije Nwokorie as its next chief exec.

Nwokorie will be familiar to those in the creative community, having previously spent 11 years with the design consultancy Wolff Olins, where he rose to CEO, before spending six years as a senior director at Apple.

Dr Martens praised Nwokorie as an “inspirational leader” and said his “experience in helping drive DTC-led growth at Apple” would be highly relevant in the years to come.

What’s for sure is that with orders for its autumn-winter collection “significantly down” on last year, an injection of creative thinking is urgently needed if the company wants its stockists to stop putting the boot in.

Source: Reuters

Superdry losing its cool

While Dr Martens will hope its legacy of fashionability can help turn around its fortunes, another British fashion business, Superdry, is in danger of not just going out of style but out of business.

The company is delisting from the stock market and has warned it could go into administration if a restructuring effort, which includes seeking rent reductions on 39 of its circa 100 UK stores, is unsuccessful.

Superdry boss Julian Dunkerton has hit back at suggestions made by its former chairman, Peter Williams, that the issues are a reflection of “a brand that is probably not as cool as it used to be.”

“That’s the problem,” he added, “because teenagers don’t necessarily want to shop where their parents used to shop and there is this natural culling of fashion brands that goes on.”

Dunkerton defending his brand as one that “speaks to all human beings” and said its diverse client base was an advantage during the “ebbs and flows of brand heat.”

But he conceded that the company’s marketing could have been more “pinpointed” to younger shoppers, with rivals stealing a march among influencers and on social media.

Source: BBC

Adobe open-minded about OpenAI

Adobe is burnishing its credentials as a keen adopter of generative AI by exploring the possibility of allowing third-party tools such as OpenAI’s Sora inside its video editing software, which is widely used in the advertising industry.

The company insists such integrations are still at the experimental stage, with issues needing to be resolved including copyright challenges and how revenue would be distributed between Adobe and outside developers.

It is yet another signal, though, of how eagerly Adobe is embracing the march of AI. The company has already shared how users of its Premiere Pro video editing software will be able to fill in parts of a scene with AI-generated objects or remove distractions without the manual intervention of a human video editor, thanks to its own AI product, Firefly. But this is made possible by Firefly being trained on images Adobe has the rights to, therefore indemnifying users from copyright claims.

“Our industry-leading AI ethics approach and the human bias work that we do, none of that’s going away,” Subramaniam told Reuters. “What we’re really excited to do is explore a world where you can have more choice beyond that through third-party models.”

As The Drum reported from the annual Adobe Summit in Las Vegas this month, the company is increasingly becoming an important strategic partner of advertising agencies and also one of the industry’s prime disruptors.

Source: Reuters

Ernie earns the plaudits

Staying with AI, Baidu says its ChatGPT rival ‘Ernie Bot’ has now reached 200 million users.

The milestone was announced by the Chinese firm’s chief exec, Robin Li, during its ‘AI Create’ conference in Shenzhen. The company claims around 5,000 people were in attendance.

Baidu used the gathering to announce another round of its AI development competition, offering a prize of $7m, and to unveil a range of developer tools, including the ability to create and integrate AI-powered chatbots with Baidu web search.

Earnie Bot’s rapid growth since its public release last August is another sign of the global interest in generative AI and a growing west v east battle for dominance.

With 14.9m visits across its app and website last month, it still has some way to go to rival the popularity of market leader Chat GPT, however. The San Francisco-based service, engineered by OpenAI, reached 1.86bn views last month.

Source: CNBC