LOUISE CHRISTOPHER: CX Expert & Founder of LCXWORKS

‍Louise Christopher had spent over twenty years building customer experience for some of retail's biggest names when she took a week's holiday in the north east of Scotland one January. It was dark, damp and icy for most of it, and she spent the entire week walking around with an enormous smile on her face. Driving home past Loch Ness, she spotted a beautiful house with a for sale sign outside, and that was more or less that. Today Louise and her husband are the custodians of Brylach Steading - an enclosed courtyard of three beautifully restored cottages overlooking the glen in the heart of Speyside, built in 1873 as the carriage houses and stables of Rothes Glen House. Alongside it she runs LCXWORKS | The Business of Experience, helping other companies transform their customer and employee experience.

Long before Brylach, Louise built the first personal shopping service on the British high street at Topshop, led personal shopping at Selfridges, and led customer experience for McDonald's Australia, ASOS, Gap and Browns Fashion. The same instinct runs through all of it, just at wildly different scales: work out how to make people feel properly looked after, then build the operation that lets it happen every time.

She's also warm, very funny and entirely without pretence, the kind of person who'll tell you about grooming the tail of a life-size mahogany horse (more on that later!) and a multi-million dollar drive-through metric in the same breath.

From horses to Harrods

Louise didn't set out for fashion at all and studied equestrian studies at university, intending to become an equestrian psychologist until a rather cruel twist of fate saw her develop an allergy to horses while working at the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace. With her chosen path closed off overnight, Louise was flicking through Horse and Hound magazine wondering what on earth to do next when she spotted an advert for a role in Harrods' equestrian department.

On day one in that role, Louise found herself grooming the tail of a sixteen-two-hands-high mahogany horse that stood on the shop floor which wasn’t exactly what anyone pictures when they imagine a career in luxury retail! She then quickly became the top salesperson on her floor.

"I had subject matter expertise in abundance, having had horses since I was a child, and I'd worked in shops, and I like a chat, so I was pretty good at it."

Local women started coming in and asking for her by name, over and over, though at the time she couldn't quite work out what it was she was doing that made them come back. Assuming at the time that her London accent meant she'd never build a career somewhere that formal, on the tube home one evening Louise saw an advert in the newspaper for Topshop.

“I read the job advert and thought, ‘I don't actually know what this job is, but I really, really, really want that job!’”

The best induction money could buy

That job turned out to be launching and running the first personal shopping service on the high street, under Jane Shepherdson. Louise landed it at 22 and spent the following seven and a half years building the service into something that launched internationally and a team of 110.

New starters were sent on a week-long induction at the original Soho House, with fashion designers and editors coming in to speak and the executive team present most days, plus she was given an executive coach to work with.

"I just don't see these kinds of things happen anymore, but the investment in us made us feel so special, proud, empowered."

Another session that stuck with her was an actress led series of workshops on the art of conversation. Everyone was filmed and given feedback, which Louise describes as extremely uncomfortable, but also one of the best things she's ever done. Another session that stayed with her was on what actually drives and motivates people underneath their behaviour, which gave her a principle she still applies today.

"Everyone says treat others how you want to be treated, but actually you should treat others how they want or need to be treated."

Underneath all of it, Louise is open about the imposter syndrome she was carrying, having studied horses rather than fashion and finding herself surrounded by people she describes as uber stylish and cool. Nobody made her feel that way, she's clear about that, but she felt it anyway, and what the coaching gave her wasn't advice so much as somewhere to stop and quieten the voice telling her she didn't belong.

An unexpected lesson

After Jane left Topshop and the culture shifted, Louise accepted a role at Selfridges to lead personal shopping, where she occasionally found herself again feeling like she didn't quite fit. Then a regular customer pulled her up on something, and it changed how she showed up for good.

“Amy Winehouse said to me, ‘Lou, why'd you talk in your telephone voice? You don't have to. You’re from London, just be yourself!’”

Louise describes feeling mortified, but also that she knew Amy was right, so from that day on, Louise has vowed to just be herself no matter who the client is.

“Everyone just appreciates authenticity, and if you can be comfortable in your own skin and show up as yourself, warts and all, they really respect you.”

The Louis Vuitton of fast food

Customer experience wasn't yet an established term, but a trusted colleague during her Topshop time convinced Louise that she was sitting on something the industry was about to want badly, so she decided to take the leap and go out on her own. It was a huge leap of faith, not remotely the steady-salary path she'd been brought up to expect, but she took it and went on to work with ASOS, Whistles and Gap Europe.

"I loved it, loved it, loved it."

In 2015, three senior job offers arrived at once from Mytheresa, Zalando and Myer and Louise chose Australia, staying five years across Melbourne and Sydney. Her final role there surprised everyone, including her: Head of Customer Experience for McDonald's Australia.

"It's such a mega brand, and so global and massive, I thought, why would you not want to go and have that experience? To me, it was like the Louis Vuitton of fast food brands."

The business had invested heavily in kiosks and drive-through automation and wanted the human side to keep pace. Louise and her team built a concept they called the Maccas Experience, working across language, team member uniforms and the kiosk experience itself. The margins involved are extraordinary - shaving one second off each stage of the drive-through, across every restaurant in the country, added up to millions of dollars of opportunity. With around eighty per cent of the business franchisee-led, it was effectively a job working for two hundred CEOs, all of whom had to be won over rather than instructed. So Louise did what she always does.

“I went and got myself a uniform, and I went to different restaurants, and I worked on the fries. And I can tell you that Happy Meal box, you need a degree to make those things, because I still couldn't do it!”

Satisfaction scores improved across the board, without any negative impact on speed or revenue.

“It doesn't matter if it's cheeseburgers or Celine handbags. If you have the right approach to being very customer centric, looking at the details, wanting to give the most wonderful experience you can relative to whatever that product is, then it's principally the same.”

Coming home

Covid, a sudden bereavement and her father becoming seriously ill all landed at once, and Louise took it as the universe telling her and her husband to come home, which brought her to Browns Fashion and Farfetch. After years of being undiagnosed and misdiagnosed, she had recently been told she was living with stage four endometriosis and adenomyosis, and on receiving the offer she had to disclose that she needed major surgery and would immediately go into early, surgical menopause.

“They basically just said no problem, the job's yours, you start when you're ready, which was just amazing. They even fast-tracked my private health cover for the surgery.”

Being met with that kind of support meant Louise went in full of gusto and all guns blazing, spending the next four years there. As the wider challenges facing that part of the industry became clearer, and with her health and her sense of what actually mattered pulling in a particular direction, Louise started thinking about a different kind of next chapter. Cue the January trip to Scotland.

Building Brylach

Arriving at Brylach is not a key safe and a four digit code. Louise recalls one rainy afternoon when a guest pulled into the courtyard and she went out to meet her, holding an umbrella over her guest's head as she got out of the car and walking her inside into the warmth. The guest was slightly amazed, and told her it was like arriving at the Savoy. Louise finds this hilarious, because in her own mind she hadn't done anything at all - it was raining, so you take an umbrella out - but this is where twenty years of luxury client experience reveals itself.

"Put the champagne down. Everyone wants to stand and have a conversation and get the glass of champagne out, but you have to make sure the operational efficiencies are there."

Pristine white towels, beautiful high quality bedding, and absolutely spotless cottages. Get all of that right, and it buys the time for the little touches guests actually remember - flowers in the kitchen, a bottle of something local left out for the evening, the small adjustments made because Louise noticed what somebody needed before they mentioned it.

Her sense of where a stay begins and ends extends well past the courtyard gate. Guests receive thoughtful itineraries, and every recommendation is somewhere she and her husband have been and loved themselves, The Macallan and Johnstons of Elgin among them.

The three cottages sit around a courtyard in Moray and Speyside, with the Cairngorms up the road and whisky country all around, rural enough to feel like a true country escape but close enough to towns and villages that nothing is a trek. Beyond them is the woodland, where Louise has been building a nature area and where the majority of her client experience ideas seem to turn up. The latest is a whisky trail winding through the trees, with a dram waiting at each stop along the way.

Regardless of how idyllic a picture it paints, Louise is quick to correct anyone who assumes a move to the Highlands meant semi-retirement. She and her husband are working harder, longer and more days than they ever did in corporate roles, and she's cheerfully unapologetic about it, because this time it's theirs. And there's still a performance dashboard, still KPIs, still a tightly run budget.

"I'll always love a KPI!"

Which is presumably why she hasn't stopped there, LCXWORKS is properly underway alongside Brylach now, and the two together are exactly the balance Louise was after. For the moment she's focusing close to home, running CX workshops with the Moray Chamber of Commerce for business owners and leaders across the region, and working on projects with a large local whisky brand, among other things. There are enquiries coming in from further afield too, which will mean some travel, but the pull towards adding something to this particular corner of Scotland is clearly the stronger one. As she says with a laugh, it was never going to be just one thing!

My take

The telephone voice is something I think will resonate with most people, myself included. Like Louise, I came into this industry sideways. I couldn't afford to work unpaid in London the way you were expected to back then, so I found another way in and worked my way up, and there were plenty of years where I'd sit in trade meetings with something I wanted to say and just not say it. What I didn't realise at the time was how exhausting it is being a slightly different version of yourself all day, and how much easier everything gets once you stop.

It's also why I get so frustrated when I see teams hired for how they look in the space rather than whether they can actually talk to anybody who walks through the door. I've watched a client get looked up and down by someone far too cool to serve them, and I promise you that client never came back. You can teach somebody about product. Warmth is much harder to find.

Which is why Louise's point about not seeing that kind of investment in people anymore has stuck with me. Retail is where most of us start, usually in a first job, and we ask people to build rapport with strangers, read a room and handle a complaint without ever really showing them how to do any of it. I see it most with clienteling tools, where a brilliant system in the hands of someone who's never been taught to hold a conversation just produces faster messages that still don't sound like a person. Louise has always loved a chat and been genuinely curious about people, and combining that with the exec coaching and investment in her development early on has supercharged her approach.

I love the symmetry of it all too. A career that started when horses were taken away from her has landed Louise back in a beautifully converted stable block, doing more or less what she was doing on that Harrods shop floor at 22 - working out what somebody needs and making sure they get it.

Twenty years of customer experience strategy at some of the biggest names in retail, and it still comes down to noticing that it's raining and picking up an umbrella.

Follow Louise's LCXWORKS journey here and everything Brylach Steading at @brylach_steading_speyside | www.brylach.com | stay@brylach.com

If you or anyone you know is, or may be living with Endometriosis, a great source of information and support is Endometriosis UK. Chronic pain is not normal and should be investigated. 

About the author: Pippa Mellor is a luxury retail clienteling and personal shopping consultant with over 15 years' experience in luxury fashion. Formerly leading Personal Shopping departments at NET-A-PORTER and MATCHES, today she works with luxury brands to develop clienteling strategies, personal shopping programmes and high-performing retail teams that increase client retention and revenue.

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