Bell Potter conference recording and wash up
Not now Cato!
Cettire presented at the Bell Potter Emerging Leaders (sic) Conference, and boy wasn’t it an absolute car crash. The CFO was there in person but the CEO dialled in from what we can only assume was a hostage compound.
In amongst the CEO continually looking up and to his right - presumably to read from his script for the Dorothy Dixers on his second screen - there were a few nuggets of gold to extract from the cringefest.
Go to the top of the class and sharpen the rubbers
The line from the conference that grabbed the most attention was perhaps the most comical - that the CEO believes that the company has “best in class” returns.
At this point, I believe that our returns process is best in class. Right, it's a fully automated process for our customers to initiate a return. You know, I have an Express courier, pick the goods up from their location, and ultimately, result in a refund, which happens automatically.
This doesn’t accord with personal experience, given that when we tried to return the Canada Goose jacket to Cettire, a waybill was generated with DHL but no pickup was ever booked. Indeed if it is so automated, it’s hard to reconcile with the reviews on Trustpilot that repeatedly call out how hard it is to get a return accepted
That doesn’t sound automated.
The past is just a story we tell ourselves
But no matter - Cettire are investing heavily in generative AI! Surely this will provide cost savings in allocating customer enquiries to the right team and fixing problems with orders that have been poorly treated by its suppliers who handle both inventory and returns???
Why do we need a superior customer service offering, ultimately because we're newer, right? And when you're having a new customer, when you're when you're a new entrant into the market, you have to, you know, offer and build a level of trust that others don't have to do. Right. And I think we're putting a lot of continued resource into building the customer experience, and both on on the returns and the whole customer service experience. That includes manpower, but it also includes some very deep technical initiatives that we have and some of them relate to relate to Gen AI which you probably heard from many, many different spheres.
Well we all know that the leader in the AI space is Open AI, which is run by Sam Altman. We also know that because - like most tech bros - he doesn’t take no for an answer he wanted Scarlett Johansson to be a voice of chatGPT due to the role she played in Her.
It’s an extraordinary coincidence that during Nick’s quest to get a tax receipt for the Canada Goose jacket (still unresolved after three months despite multiple alleged escalations) that both Sam and Scarlett responded to him with both effusive apologies and action items, almost as if the response was created by generative AI.
Is it possible that the investment in AI has been to automate the process of giving customers the run around, which according to Tegus transcripts of interviews with ex-Cettire employees was previously handled manually?
That’s one way to build a returns function, but not a good one.
Making the customer experience worse for fun and profit
In fact from Tegus transcripts we learn that Cettire did actually once check their product before it went out to customers - but that was too expensive so they decided to just send stuff out anyway. As a reminder, Cettire claims that not a single fake has ever been proved (by Cettire) to have been shipped by them.
Bold strategies
This is all good fun - and as far as I am aware this is the first time that the founder has appeared in a public forum where it has been possible for the wider investing public to assess the cut of his jib and generally assess whether this is a serious company run by serious people. And on that note, here is a recording of the Bell Potter conference, provided in the public interest and relying on the fair dealing exemptions in the copyright act - if the copyright holder is Bell Potter then it is hereby acknowledged.
I encourage everyone to watch and judge for themselves the calibre of the people involved.
Bringing in the big guns to shoot at one’s feet
This change in strategy around the founder’s public appearances is doubly exciting because it appears to coincide with a changing of the guard in Cettire’s comms team - moving from the penny stock promoter’s team of choice NWR Communications to crisis comms specialist Sue Cato of Cato + Clive.
Make no mistake - Sue is a big hitter. Since being freed from the yoke of the dearly departed Joe Aston’s intellectual property, she has enjoyed such successes as representing failed defamation litigant Ben Roberts-Smith, the first person to use the courts to show on the balance of probabilities that he was a war criminal; various partners from PwC who it was alleged were privy to information that the firm had used confidential information about the Australian government’s efforts to prevent tax avoidance to advise their multinational clients on how to circumvent such efforts, the scandal resulting in PwC’s government advisory business being sold for a single gold coloured coin to private equity; and conflicted REIT operator and financial advice business Dixon Advisory who were subsumed into friend of the show Julian Mulcahy’s current carer, Evans and Partners.
Sue has provided sage advice in crisis comms for many a year, including such insights as
The biggest error you can make, Cato warns, is to not have your facts straight.
Sue definitely qualifies as a Person of Interest, so congratulations to her!
Just Simple Mitan
This opens up an intriguing line of inquiry, because in the Australian’s exposé of the founder’s past which alleged direct links between companies associated with the founder and the strippermaster.com website, there is a statement from a “Cettire source” that the founder’s business Just Simple “never had an association with Mitan”.
This is provably false, as this grab from the wayback machine of the justsimple.com.au website shows:
Indeed a search of the corporate records surrounding the founder’s resignation from Mitan group shows a discrepancy between the alleged date of his resignation and transfer of his ownership interest to the other member - 17 January 2010, 5 days after the web forum complaint about alleged scammy activities - and the date that this was filed with ASIC, which was 12 August 2010, well beyond the 28 day period that is mandatory for changes in directors to be filed within.
Intriguing - both why this denial came from an unnamed “Cettire source” and the background of the founder. Since the company decided to sue a vulnerable customer who received a fake hoodie, these lines of inquiry have become increasingly relevant for investors to assess the qualities of the custodians of their capital.
I was once of the opinion that people are entitled to a past, and that the more salacious revelations from due diligence investigations could be put to one side. I could be persuaded of that view again if the company made an undertaking not to sue Daniel, made a public apology to him and acknowledged that it is possible that non-genuine goods could enter their supply chain, made an ex-gratia payment to Daniel to compensate him for threatening to sue him, and made a large payment to a charity of Daniel’s choice. I sincerely hope that the company makes this choice, and that their new representation advises them that this is the best course of action for them - because it is the right thing to do.
Give the people what they want
One of the most bizarre elements of the bulls’ response to every new revelation about Cettire is the idea “that’s not as strong as the prior stuff” whilst simultaneously dismissing the prior stuff about duties non-payment and sales tax non-registration as “old news”- it’s almost as if there’s no news that could be bad news. We’ll be circling back soon enough, but when there’s so much material sometimes it’s tough to parse everything into a cogent piece that even the likes of WAM can understand. So please bear with us, there is plenty more to come.