In Annice Chang’s blog, she commented on the article from The Globe and Mail and suggested the Wantering to focus on their marketing structure to achieve cultural coherence on operation. While my agreement lies with Annice’s view on the importance of a thorough understanding on their marketing structure, I would also recommend the firm to slow its pace of development and have a more steady progress of expansion than the current one.
Wantering was launched in late 2011 by Matt Friesen and several other co-founders. It has made a significant expansion in mere three years. It achieved an audience of nearly one million, it acquired a LA-based fashion social network called StyledOn and it opened two branch offices in New York and Los Angeles. However, such development can cause potentially risky problems. Given the size of Wantering’s business, it is incongruent that the company merely has fourteen employees in total. Although the number is small, Wantering is still struggling to reach a common company culture since they are spread across the continent where seven are in the headquarter in Vancouver, four in New York and two in Los Angeles. What’s more, Wantering is suffering incoherence due to not only geographical diversity, but also clashes between enterprise cultures due to its acquisition of StyledOn. “Merging two completely discrete teams into one cohesive unit takes some challenges,” Mr. Friesen says. “It’s further exacerbated by the fact that we’re all in so many different locations.”
(source: blogs.sas.com)
A diversity in corporate culture benefits Wantering with a global outlook of fashion design and enables Wantering to take the lead in its market with international outreach on newest fashion trends of different geographical locations, however it appears to be too soon and costly for Wantering to enter this stage as a start-up company with only three years of market experience. Instead of going global in this early stage, I recommend Wantering to focus on the Vancouver market at this moment since it is where its headquarters is located. Even though a cultural diversity is important for a fashion company, it is also essential to emphasize on a clear and strong enterprise culture. This culture can not be gained through a diverse office locations, but only raised by a consistent implementation of its corporate spirit. After reaching a coherence on the enterprise culture, it can then bring geographical and cultural diversity with expansion of the firm to further strength the existing common corporate spirit among different branches.