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[00:00:00] Welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket, where we sit down with digital and product leaders. Today, we're talking to Elizabeth Van Bergen, who leads product experience at Philips, a global high end auction house. In this episode, we talk about creating a product experience for both tech novices and entrepreneurs.

And early adopters, how the auction industry went digital overnight and why the digital experience is as important as the actual functionality itself. So here's our episode with Elizabeth Van Bergen. Hey Elizabeth, welcome to the show. Stoked to have you on. How's it going? It's great.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited about this. Yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to this one, especially we can just dive right in. One thing I love after we, you know, talked and went through a little bit of background earlier last week, I think living proof right here that liberal arts degrees can lead into all sorts of great blending of The arts and sciences and STEM stuff right here where you're now running product and experience for one of the giant sources of maybe [00:01:00] taste in our modern culture.

We like to think that we're a giant source of taste at Gallup's, but I have a background in art history and I think I have said to you multiple times, my dad's just really excited that I've found a way to do something. With the degree, which I guess I don't disagree with, but I've been able to make my career what I've wanted it to be.

And so for me, first it was opportunity within the digital content space. And then that kind of grew into product from there. Yeah. First, any place that's able to sell a Paul Newman watch, original Rolex. I am a huge fan of just right off the bat. I think that's high taste right there. You've made a whole career.

Out of basically, how do you productize taste? How do you communicate? Cool. How do you get people hooked on that feeling between PR and into the auction world and fine arts world? It's been a ride of some pretty cool [00:02:00] experiences, huh? Yeah, definitely. So I started within the art world and the auction space in PR.

So from that position. We were really storytelling. I took storytelling and I turned that into social media, which is more on the content side. And then product isn't that far of a stretch from that, right? We were just storytelling in a different way. So at Philips, I oversee our experience and that's across both responsive and our app.

And it's interesting. We have these very different objects. Some of them are very specific. Some come with really voracious collecting groups, all like watches. The Paul Newman Rolex, for example, was very popular. Also a timely fact, the Rolex that we sold is actually more than Paul Newman's current New York city apartment is being sold for, uh, which, The watch was given to him by Joanne Woodward and his [00:03:00] apartment was also the one that he shared with Joanne Woodward.

So I saw that headline recently, which I thought was funny. Maybe she's the lucky charm actually. I think maybe. Yeah, exactly. So it's interesting because you really have to take objects that are meant to be experienced in person or have very specific nuances to them. A watch, if you're looking at a dial, it's very important.

Paintings, the canvas, the brush strokes, additions. Can you see the signature from the artist? And the, the edition number and things like that. So all of these things are really important to show through experience. And when you're taking something that's very high value and also seen in person, I would say seen as.

At least previously seen as an in the in person experience was more valuable than the digital experience. It's definitely been an interesting journey, if you will, not to use overuse journey as we do sometimes. You know, I think there's a lot of lessons here that [00:04:00] not just, if you think about just in the world of high end, uh, auction houses, there's only so many that operate at scale.

Um, but if you think about what you just talked about, right, like how do you take an experience that's meant to be in person and put it online? How do you build digital experiences that match to expectations? And that could be, like you said, seeing the fine brushstrokes of an artist. That also comes down to just like trying on a pair of pants or Warby Parker years ago, Had the glasses, you and I both are challenged with vision.

It appears like that used to be something you had to go and I would try on dozens. And, but they came up with the great idea of we'll ship you a bunch and just ship some of them back. So there's all these ways to solve this. idea of high touch, what used to be expensive problems and solve it in digital ways or blend the digital and the in person that really interesting to see like how you've approached it here in a world where glasses are somewhat expensive, but they're not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, but a lot of those lessons poured.

So definitely, I think the [00:05:00] point is made that it's interesting to see how all of these things come across. Now, I actually have a bit of a question for you on this is, I think at some level you've built a career, and please tell me if you disagree, but you've built a career on being able to package this feeling or package this, there's some level with a lot of the art, especially like Phil steals with, of you get more than just seeing a picture.

You get a feeling or it's cool. It's taste. It's something about it. What is taste? I think taste is one of those great things where it's. It's very personal to everyone. So one of the great things that we do on the experience side of things for Philips is we provide an experience that can work across clients who want absolutely no touch, if you will.

They are fine navigating our site on their own. They love the experience. viewing our app all the way to the clients who are like ultra high touch personal communications, showing them the art, but [00:06:00] also being able to offer a digital experience to that same client, maybe prior to being able to visit the work in person or prior to being able to see the watch in person.

So a lot of what we do is offer different multimedia for our objects, whether that's a 360. In terms of similar to if you were shopping for shoes and you wanted to see the 360 view and the soles and things like that. We offer that for some of our objects, or we also have something that we do for all of our high value paintings, object videos.

This allows clients to be able to see the surface of the painting and to really give that feeling of being with the work without having to. So that is one of the biggest things that we try is we try to offer accessibility to what we're selling, no matter where our clients or future buyers or interested parties may [00:07:00] be in the world, basically.

But even zooming out right from Phillips, because I think some of your early experience was right around, how do you connect? influencers to brands or help transmit this cachet that they have of just their kind of general aura to these brands that want to be associated. And I think oftentimes the most common thing they're going for is some kind of credibility or cool or association with high taste beyond the realm of just the product experience.

I think certain people are also inclined to have a huge appetite for learning and education. And that can also lend itself to creating taste for the individual. So I think that whether you want to get into collecting or even me from a product standpoint, it's not something that I necessarily did in a very traditional way.

I like to educate myself on things that I don't know, or things that I'm interested in that are related to other interests. And so I feel like tastes can also be, I think the more, [00:08:00] Individuals that you can come across within your career or, or personal lives that come from different backgrounds. I think that's hugely educational and also just helpful in forming tastes.

I think from an experience standpoint, you always have to understand that not every user is going to be the same. We say clients at Philips, but user would definitely be the more ubiquitous term in terms of not every user is going to be the same. So how do you create an experience for. Every user. And I think that's a problem that we're all trying to solve or working towards solving.

I don't think it's ever like in a finalized state. I think there's always iterating, which is also what I did in content, right? Like I had, may have had a couple of videos or posts do well, or partnerships that did well with brands, but you can't keep doing the same thing. You always have to iterate on that.

So I take that into products as well. I heard someone recently talking about more applicable to work and how taste applies. There is taste is the ability. [00:09:00] To fairly accurately be able to predict something is going to work or resonate before you actually do it. And I've always been, this has been one of those things that has been a constant debate with a couple of colleagues of mine, uh, across companies is what is taste?

How do you learn it? Can you learn it? Like, When you're looking for people, do you need to just go find people with it? Or can you level people up there? And it's been one of my constant back to, you brought curious curiosity. I think that's an area I'm always poking around in because I don't think I necessarily have the instinct for it, but always trying to learn some hopeful.

It's learnable. Yeah, I, I think it's definitely learnable or even I think building a team around people with different skillsets is really important as well. So maybe one person isn't as inclined to one way of thinking, but another person is. So for me, it's really great working with people who are more technical because I come from a very visual [00:10:00] content.

I don't want to say like flowery background, but it's a lot more like visual, like I can tell if something is a couple of pixels off, whereas I might be working with someone on a more technical side, he'd be like, what are you talking about? I'm like, this is literally like a pixel off. Like it's, there's something off about it.

So to me, that's really helpful. Because they may present something to me where I think I have a solution for whatever we're working on and they're like, actually, that's not going to work. Technically we need to do it this way. So I think in terms of having that kind of variety of talent is super helpful.

I know I've learned a lot more and that's how I've been able to grow into different roles by counting on other people really knowing that code more than myself. Whereas I know the experience maybe more than they do. We're even you brought up one of the ways when you're passing a product was when you're building experiences You're not maybe thinking as much about you have cohort of PMS and pride people and engineers and designers who have very like frameworked [00:11:00] process driven and then there's the other kind of side of how you get there, which is a little bit more instinctual or Maybe qualitative about how you think about what users need and what's going to deliver them a great experience.

I think you nailed it right there. Right. The probably best way is having a team where you have a bit of both sides, that a structured way of thinking through it and, uh, maybe a more qualitative, some might view it as intuitive, I think oftentimes though. Intuitive comes from doing the work to study and understanding.

One thing I'd love to chat with you about is your time over at Phillips. Basically you talked about, you were in content for a while, and one of the things that kind of helped you move into product was that, the kind of understanding of what, you know, The users or client wanted what they were looking for, how to deliver a great experience.

But you made that transition just in time for the bottom to completely drop out the in person market for high end auctions to just end like overnight seemingly. And of course, we're talking about 2020 and COVID. What was that like? Like, [00:12:00] how did that look for a business that relied so heavily on in person events to just basically binary go to zero?

I think it was really, it was a reckoning for the whole world, but I think for an industry that is so rooted in tradition, like the auction world, it was really, um, the catalyst that drove everyone to really be interested in the change. Not that they weren't interested before, But in the before times, I'll say there were a lot of other aspects of the job that were more important.

So while the social media presence of the auction house was incredibly important before, and then even more so after, During the pandemic, there were just other focuses across the board for our specialists who are experts in various different categories. There were industry specific events that really people counted on [00:13:00] people being there and attending, whether it was Basel or Frieze or various different art fairs.

So it was, you know, There were just other things that were happening. It wasn't that people didn't know that it needed to happen, that we didn't need to change our digital offerings. It just wasn't the core of what we were doing. Like some of our other, you look at like luxury e commerce sites like Net a Porter or Moda or something like that, where that is their core is e commerce.

Ours was something else. So, you know, during the pandemic, it was the It was the moment where everybody was like, okay, let's do this. Let's make a shift. So while it was an incredibly successful several years for us, as well as other, you know, streaming platforms, et cetera, as well. But I always like to say it changing something within the auction world can sometimes be like trying to, sometimes it's like trying to move a mountain, right?

Like you're trying to move them out and you're trying to explain something that is [00:14:00] maybe very foreign to what. Our specialists are used to doing it. This is how we've done it for 20, 30 years. Some of the people within Philips and the auction world have done this their entire career. Whereas I have been doing this for about eight years.

Some of my colleagues have been here 20, 25 at Philips for that length of time. So they have a way of working that they're just used to working. So the pandemic was great because it changed. Everybody's minds and it rerouted how people were thinking about things like, what can I do for this client or what can I offer them digitally versus I can't offer them this in gallery experience during their preview.

But could we do something on the site? Could we do something on the app? Is there a video we can do for them? Is there a partnership with an influencer that we can do to really with them? show this collection to a wider audience. Cause that's also something that auction houses are always looking for is you're always looking for [00:15:00] who is the next generation of a buyer and consigner.

You never want to stagnate at your core that has been your client for years, because at a certain point they start to. Move on as well. That's essentially what, you know, what it is. You need to always keep churning this pretty small group of clients that you've been used to always interacting with. So during the pandemic, it really opened up this world.

Like, Oh, actually we can reach all of these people by changing up all of our tactics and not only can we reach all of these new people using, whether it's like digital pay media or something like that, we can actually also track quantitatively. More so than we had in the past. So that was really one of the biggest changes is that everybody was immediately on board, but there was no selling anything to anyone.

They're like, sure, what do we need to do? And I think we went from having two online [00:16:00] sales to, I think we had the 20 or something like that, like immediately. It's still moving a mountain. It's just like. One is over millions of years, and one's Mount St. Helens blowing. Both of them moved the mountain, just one happened in a very binary fashion.

Very quickly, very quickly, yeah. But at the advent of this, it seems like one thing that you did very well, that was prescient, was seeing social as a channel. 

What was the thought process there of how you're going to lean in and make this thing happen again in a place where in an industry where speed of change is not known to be their biggest thing? I think for, and also perhaps maybe the wider company, there was really nothing to lose in terms of trying something.

So I'll credit Philips forever in that we're quite agile company in terms of being one of the larger auction houses in the industry. And while the auction world takes a while to change, there is a lot of flexibility to try new things at Philips. People are willing to do so from my point of [00:17:00] view using Instagram as paid media channel and leveraging the audience that we were able to reach on there and the data that we were able to get from the interactions that we were having from that channel was a win no matter what.

Even if something didn't do well, to me that was a win. Because then we had information to one, not waste time and doing it again. And two, how can we improve it? And one of those things was really, how do we send people from a channel that is not our website or our app? How do we send them back there? So that's always in terms of when I was working on the content side of things, it's always, how do we get people back into the Philips world and the Philips ecosystem on site or on our app?

And now my job is how do I keep people in the experience once they're there? So before it was me getting them there and now it's me keeping them there. So what is that journey [00:18:00] between our site and our app? What is that journey between our pages? What is that journey between our editorial content? How do we make it more seamless?

How do we make it easier to use for all of the different clients? Whether it's someone who's very tech savvy to someone who. Might just say I just I want this and then tell an assistant to go and sort it out for them So how do we set that up for people that does bring up an interesting point though? I think looking at the breadth of of what you guys over at phillips sell or auction i'd wager you have Some cohorts of people maybe who are focused on certain products like I bet the watch Enthusiasts probably a little bit more first mover early adopter than maybe some folks buying fine oil paintings.

That could be a terrible generalization and maybe I'm wrong in the detail, but like, how do you build an experience that takes new account. These people who are a lot more technologically open and driven and they're on the newest [00:19:00] platforms and understand all these things work. And then the folks who still up until COVID basically went and sat in a room and raised, raised a paddle and maybe even didn't have smartphones.

So I think one of our big things is always creating parity between experiences. So if we have parity between our gallery experience to our app to. Our site, it creates this familiarity with the Philips world. So we always want to create the journey for the client. We want to show people what they can do, not force them.

This is what you have to do step by step, but really be able to offer someone who let's say an early adopter. They just want to register to bid, place an advanced bid, forget about it. Come back later, check in. You can do that very easily. Someone wants to really learn about that monumental canvas, or we sold a door painted by Basquiat.

Someone really wants to learn about the work, so we're offering them You know, multiple editorial articles, a video, and then [00:20:00] on the actual object page, the product page, if you will, really offering them a lot of educational content, offering them the ability to request condition reports, offering them Very easy contact information about the department.

So that person who may have had that experience or preferred that experience in person, we've really been able to also bring that online and be able to offer them. It in terms of the digital space from a product standpoint, whether or not people prefer that now because the in person experience is available.

I think that's definitely will always be a personal preference. Some people just always prefer that personal high touch, but the idea for us is to be able to create an experience where we're able to. For 80 percent of the clients, not necessary. So the 20 percent of the market that we're looking towards the ultra high net worth individuals, we will always be able to service them with whatever needs they may [00:21:00] request or ask for.

But by being able to solve for the 80%, it gives our team the. bandwidth and ability to not try and look after everything all at the same time, but really be able to focus on the ultra high net worth individuals. Whereas our tools are able to help those early adopters or people who may not need as much of a touch point.

Brings us to right across all of these. I feel like across software, we had the set up where early on, I remember back in the early days of my career, the program just needed to do the thing. Like it didn't need to be a great experience. It was just magical that you could go on your bank or that you could buy something online.

And you moved into this world then of, of software pushing maybe into a world where you want design nicely. And then it became about experience. And I would wager that. Something like Phillips, the expectation of experience is even higher there where you can't just possibly serve up some minimalist in a bad way, [00:22:00] not in a minimalist art, but like in a minimalist kind of barely there structural thing.

That's just. Sure, you can put a bid, maybe there's a weird process to it, but you need it to be an experience too that feels at the level of something that you're going to go out and buy a Basquiat or a Paul Newman watch or one of the, anything amongst that, like experience has to be part of this. Where does that, it's literally in your job title too.

So how do you look at that kind of functionality versus experience? Sure. I think it's huge. Like for, especially within a very visual industry, design and experience are key to usability just because something works doesn't mean it works well, or doesn't mean that it's right for the client necessarily.

So for us, the experience needs to be seamless. It needs to be secure. I think if someone's bidding on something for 000, a hundred thousand dollars or upwards, you want to [00:23:00] be able to use a tool that you feel works. So that means it doesn't have a weird text overlay on something that. Might be a fine bug if you were adding shoes to a cart, but not in an event based timely business.

Most of what we're selling is very, comes down to the last minute of the sale, whether it's a live auction or timed online. We really have to offer something that is seamless, fast, secure, and Easy for, uh, clients to use. You don't want to ever create something, a product where someone is bidding that is going to have any sort of lag time, because the moment that you put a bid in, especially towards the end of a sale is key to if, whether or not you win that, that object that you're bidding on.

Removing the ability for somebody to do something. That needs to happen quickly and telling someone to go somewhere else is not necessarily the solution.

So I think from [00:24:00] a, sometimes from a technical standpoint, it's, well, it works, and then from my standpoint, I'm like, I totally agree it does work, but trying to explain that it works, but with that asterisk is where it becomes difficult. So that experience part of it is really so key to what we do, even from building a new product to just our very basic, like.

day to day fixes. I was at, well, at one point was a extremely successful department store recently. And I think they're not probably doing as well as they have been in the past, but what was interesting was I had something I wanted to buy. I had it in my hand and I walked up to a cash register, which had a person at it and was told, Oh no, I'm not actually a cash register.

You have to go over. I think someone's at that one over there. I saw someone there. So they sent me over there. Again, person was at the register who I was told, no, I'm not actually a register despite there was a register there. I think you can check it over there. I went to the third one. There was [00:25:00] no one at that one.

Even they didn't. And finally I could see like a central register and finally went there, but I was bounced between four different places. The equivalent of right? Like you can't put a bid in here. You have to go over there, pay here. Finally ended up there. And I was thinking if I didn't, I had, I absolutely needed the thing.

I had spilled something on a shirt and I needed a new shirt really quickly, but that's kind of thing, right? It served the purpose. I checked out, I gave them money. I got my shirt, but. The experience wise, it's terrible. And you're a, you're not going to go back to something like that. But I can't even imagine if I was, I'm definitely not going to buy a nice suit there now.

Right, exactly. And I think the key is what you just said is you're not going to go back to something like that. So that is relationships within our industry are keys. So you want. People to keep coming back because whether someone is a consigner or a buyer, both are clients. Either way, the company is making money and it's important to service both of those clients.

So you always want people to be coming [00:26:00] back because it's, it can be a really great, it can be a really great system. If you have a happy buyer, they come back, let's say maybe five, 10 years later, and they sell. You have a happy consigner. They like working with Phillips. And so now they only buy with Phillips or they only look for certain, maybe they only buy watches with Phillips or they only buy additions with Phillips or things like that.

So you also develop a brand loyalty if you will. And then also that trust is really key. Um, I can only imagine, especially in something. The level of high end that Philips operates in, there's a lot of trust that goes into that, that you've sourced the right things, that there is this, it's going to be handled well.

You don't want to be buying a million dollar painting plus from someone who's like shoddy work everywhere else. So that level of trust seems vital. It's definitely key. I'm not a specialist. I don't work on the sales team, but I feel it just as much as someone who's on a specialist team, who's working with a client, if something does that.

Work correctly because I'm like, [00:27:00] one, that's not the way it's supposed to work anyway. And two, I know how important that the seamlessness of an experiences ought digitally, even to our specialists who are in person with a client. So even though some of what we do is still, and will always be in person, that digital aspect of it, if someone's trying to WhatsApp someone, something after a meeting that they said that they could, and now all of a sudden, That share option isn't providing the correct metadata that's supposed to be there, that can be really frustrating.

Can also like not always look as nice. And sometimes it just needs to look nice too. things looking right. And being for lack of a better word, like attractive is an important part of how we. We can't assign this much value to some of these art materials and art outputs and then say how we look as an app is meaningless, but it's the same thing, right?

You don't own the in person experience, but I think it's kind of level of right to go back to taste or kind of luxury, this level of. [00:28:00] Experience that Phillips offers and probably other similar high end art houses, it's not one person's job or one team's job. You're not going to have just a terrible digital experience.

They're all part of what makes this such a great experience. But even back to, so one thing I'm curious about is you talked about, it takes a, it takes a team and it was in person people, there's your team doing experience, so we're going to have to actually build that too. How does that interaction look?

And how do you. I feel like it must take a lot of trust to, you don't have an engineering background, you don't have a code background, but you have to work with someone who does to build these things. How do you communicate that where the output is going to be functional, but also pretty for lack of a better word.

Right. I think it's, I, I, I do think it's probably maybe a change for some of the. Folks who have come in recently because auction is very specific. I don't expect anyone to know what it is at all when they [00:29:00] come to Phillips. Because when I started at Christie's years ago, I didn't know what it was. And there were so many things that people would say.

I felt like my head was spinning. So a lot of it is just understanding where everybody's expertise lies. I have a lot of expertise within the industry. Okay. The industry in general, and then Philips, as well as our internal stakeholders within the departments. That is where I have really strong level of expertise.

I know how our site and our app publishing functions because I oversee that team. So just in terms of historical knowledge, I have a lot of that background. Whereas people who are coming in from somewhere else, they have really great backgrounds in best practices of how to set up AWS and how to better Code our conditional report reports on our site, or even just a simpler way of pulling in our data instead of pulling in everything in various different steps.

So like this [00:30:00] step is redundant. We don't need this. So the Java team won't, we'll just ignore it and we can move forward. That's not something that we've ever had before. So it's really great being able to work with someone who's more technical. Be like, Oh, the API doesn't even need that because we can do it this way.

Oh, sick. That's great. Let's do it. Go faster and it's a better experience. Exactly. So we've really been able to scale quickly, I would say, despite not everybody really understanding auction or anything like that, because they don't have to, I, I know that some of my other colleagues, we know that we can provide that, um, education, and that's not something that.

That's something that's pretty easy to learn in terms of it's just a lot, but having someone who knows like best practices in terms of those things that I just mentioned is really helpful because while we like to say that we are digital first at Philips, we are an auction house. We're very visual. And having that technical expertise is key [00:31:00] because we don't necessarily have that amongst the rest of the departments.

They're experts in watches, contemporary art, really amazing at curating exhibitions and speaking with clients. So it's very much a collaborative effort. I would say at Philips in terms of everybody Being able to bring something to the table, I think that's a really big part of what I like the most about where Philips is going now and in the future is that everybody has something to contribute and it's nice to be part of a greater purpose, if you will.

So we're a global business. We have to be digital. Everybody across our locations. Needs to be able to have the same access to the same high quality data or features for their clients. So even if they use it a little bit differently, they still need to be able to access the same tools. This has been fantastic.

I feel like I learned so much about the art world and a [00:32:00] world I dream of one day being able to come in and be a customer of yours, maybe buy one of those Paul Newman watches, but, but until then, I really appreciate you coming on. This is, So much fun, Elizabeth, and really cool to hear about how maybe something a little bit less traditional than maybe some of the audience things about operates.

You know, people have questions or follow up things. Is there a great way to reach you? Is, are you on LinkedIn or what's a good way to follow up? Yeah, I think the best way to follow up is just I'm on LinkedIn, Elizabeth Van Bergen. All one word and they can find me there. Please feel free to connect with me, reach out.

If you have any further questions, I'm happy to ask them. I always find it interesting to speak to people. Jeff, like yourself, it's a more traditional product background just because I come from, Such, not that. So like I was saying before, I learned something from everyone. So I've really enjoyed speaking with yourself, speaking with Emily, speaking with Sybil.

It's been, yeah, it's been fun. Thanks a lot. Yeah. So much fun having you on. I think that's where that's, that might be where taste comes from. It's being able to blend all those backgrounds and [00:33:00] synthesizing together. So cool. It's great. It was a blast and look forward to talking again. Thank you so much, Elizabeth.

Thanks so much, Jeff.