OMOSA Meets: Florence Romain, Category Specialist at Rituals

Florence’s eCommerce career began in the deep end, at small DTC brand Lou Ye Tu. “It was total chaos, no long-term vision, just constant reactive ops. I joined right in the middle of a website redesign, and I was basically alone, with only a junior intern.” What she lacked in structure, she made up for in speed. She learned directly from the developer and from the founder, who brought a Procter & Gamble background and instilled a culture of dashboards, tracking, and performance.

A short stint at Sisley Cosmetics followed, but proved disappointing. “I felt completely useless. It was so big and fragmented, everyone had a microscopic role.”

Everything changed at Ysé, a mid-sized, fast-growing lingerie brand. “Ysé was all about consolidation. I got to build a real team, structure roles, define who owns what.” Florence hired a project manager, a performance/CRM manager, a site merchandiser, and interns. She led a headless migration, implemented internal workflows, and grew into a true eCommerce director role.

Then came her freelance phase, and a personal breakthrough. “I had massive imposter syndrome at first. But clients started reacting like I was a genius for things I thought were obvious. That’s when I realized, okay, maybe I do have real expertise.”

In late 2023, Florence joined Rituals as Category Specialist for Gifting. The shift was dramatic. “It took me a whole month to even understand who was doing what. It’s a big company, with politics and layered structures, but I was genuinely surprised by how much ownership I was given.”

Each product category at Rituals has its own mini-business unit. Gifting, which includes gift sets, limited editions, Advent calendars, and more, is one of the biggest, both in complexity and revenue.

“We launch a new campaign every month. Each Market Moment, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Ramadan, Easter, Christmas, drives huge spikes in sales. Gifting is easily 30% of eCom revenue, and even more during Q4.”

Florence’s role spans everything: product assortment, forecasts, campaign planning, sales reports, homepage merchandising, stock coordination, content briefing, and more. She even oversees the Rituals B2B website, which serves hotels, gyms, and corporate gifting programs.

The most striking thing about Rituals is the depth of operational structure. Florence describes an internal team called Operational Excellence, whose only job is to make sure other teams can do theirs. “We don’t create product pages, we don’t manage translations, everything is delegated to long-time agency partners. We just brief them.”

The agency in question, NMQ, has worked with Rituals since 2007 and now dedicates 10 full-time staff to the brand. This lets category teams focus on strategy, and avoid being buried in day-to-day admin.

“The homepage alone is an entire project. Each country gets its own homepage, tailored to their holiday calendar. That’s 20+ homepages to refresh every month, in multiple languages, fully merchandised and localized.”

The downside? Data complexity. “We have multiple dashboards, finance, eCom, ERP, internal tools, and they don’t all match. There are very few analysts, so reporting is messy.”

Despite the chaos in tooling, Florence has built a solid routine for performance management. Every Monday, ahead of the weekly Commercial Monday meeting, she submits KPIs such as:

• Weekly eCom revenue (global and per category)
• Traffic, orders, and conversion rate
• Her category’s revenue share within eCom
• Sub-category performance: gift sets, value packs, hero SKUs
• Stock levels by warehouse (a critical KPI)
• Launch performance vs. same period last year

She’s also in charge of assortment strategy, and regularly produces short decks to challenge or defend product lines. A recent example: the controversial “Value Packs.” Some at Rituals wanted to kill them for brand image reasons. Florence’s analysis showed they were:

• Growing YoY
• Frequently repurchased (strong for retention)
• Market standard (even luxury brands have sets)
• Easy to rebrand (“Discovery Sets” sounds more premium)

The Market Moment model is one of the most powerful levers Florence works with. “Each holiday or campaign gets a full 360° rollout, from paid media to homepage to newsletters to app notifications.” This concentration of efforts drives peak performance.

One standout success:

“For Valentine’s Day, we launched a new XL gift set, very high price point. We positioned it as the Valentine’s hero product. It sold incredibly well. People are more generous when buying for others than for themselves.”

Rituals even runs livestreams in its app, hosted by the founder and other product experts, with thousands of concurrent viewers. Florence used this to clear 1,500 units of a product that had just come back in stock, triggering alerts and selling out in hours.

Key lesson: campaign timing, stock alignment, and messaging matter more than channel optimization.

One of Florence’s most insightful observations is about managing stakeholders. In her freelance years, she worked with both extremes:

• Overly dependent teams that relied on her to “just tell them what to do”
• Hyper-skeptical founders who challenged her every recommendation

“You have to adapt to personalities. Sometimes your role is 90% reassurance, 10% execution. Other times, it’s about fighting to prove your legitimacy.”

At Rituals, she appreciates the balance. “I’m listened to and trusted, but when targets are missed, I’m not alone. It’s not all on me.”

Still, she misses the hands-on side of things: “I loved working on UX and performance marketing. Now I’m more upstream. There’s a trade-off.”

If you’re a brand that does gifting, and let’s be honest, most lifestyle brands do, Florence’s insights are invaluable. Among her biggest takeaways:

• Localizing your gifting calendar by country is essential to scale internationally
• Gift-related campaigns drive massive spikes, especially when the product story aligns with the holiday
• Clients spend more when gifting than buying for themselves
• Back-in-stock alerts and product scarcity are effective conversion triggers
• Homepage management is a full-time job in large markets
• The battle for visibility (e.g., in nav menus) is real, and political
• Stock visibility by warehouse is a strategic KPI, not just an ops detail

“We don’t even have a proper gifting page today. No place to explain what our gift sets are, what our gift wrapping looks like. For a brand that wants to be known for gifting, that’s a big miss.”

She’s working on fixing that, and thinking about how to elevate the gifting journey across touchpoints.

Florence Romain has gone from scrappy generalist to category leader at one of Europe’s most respected well-being brands. Along the way, she’s learned to balance structure and intuition, data and storytelling, individual ownership and team coordination.

For anyone managing eCommerce at scale, or aspiring to, her story is a reminder that growth is not just about scaling faster. It’s about scaling smarter. And sometimes, that means putting the bow on your own internal processes before tying one on your products.

“At Rituals, I don’t manage a website. I manage a business line. Gifting is a product, a customer journey, a revenue stream, and a brand pillar. And I treat it that way.”