Dynamic Duos: How Movado and Within built a strong client–agency model

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, where technological innovation and ROI take center stage, it’s easy to overlook the true driver of success: the personal relationships between brand and agency leaders. Our series, Dynamic Duos, shines a spotlight on these partnerships, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how collaboration fuels campaigns and is often the secret to lasting business success.

In this conversation, we sit down with Alicia Reich, VP of digital marketing at Movado Group, and Joe Yakuel, founder and CEO of Within, to dive into what makes their partnership tick. As they talk about taking creative risks, balancing performance with branding, or aligning luxury with authenticity, they also reveal the lively dynamic at the heart of their relationship.

Alicia Reich: What does a healthy client–agency relationship look like to you?

Joe Yakuel: It starts with a partnership, versus a vendor–client relationship where the client is telling the vendor what they want them to do. We’re almost always hired as a strategic partner. If you have this mutual respect right out of the gate, we know we don’t necessarily have all the right answers and neither do you. But we’re going to find those answers together and we’ll take some risks and test and fail sometimes, but we’ll get to the best outcome by doing it as a team.

Yakuel: What about you?

Reich: You just said the magic words, which are “strategic partner.” We view the agency as another extension of our team. Really it goes down to partnership — the definition of the word is that we’re working together toward one goal.

Yakuel: We talk a lot about goal and constraint as a framework for execution. That really helps us work with clients inside of a process [so] that everybody understands what we're trying to achieve and what the constraints are that might be holding us back from maximizing that to infinity, so to speak. We want to drive innovation, but we don’t want to compromise the integrity of the Movado brand. How does that happen in real life for you?

Reich: I love this thinking, this goal and constraint. But then I said, “Oh my god, implementing that, it’s a lot of trust.” But we did it and it’s been a really good pivot.

The first thing was understanding where [goals and constraints] were within each of our businesses. I remember conversations at the very beginning, like “Are our goal and constraints even right?” The definition of goal and constraint was different for each brand [within the Movado portfolio]. Was it holding a goal and constraint at a campaign level and saying, "These campaigns have to hit a certain ROAS, and in order to do so we have to trust the process and let the algorithms do their thing?" 

We had to have some tough conversations with Within, who said, “If this is really the goal and constraint you want, we have to fundamentally change your structure because you’re not set up for this.” And as we started our relationship, we came with this open-mindedness — and maybe even open-heartedness — to say, “We got you, you got us, we’re going to try this and we’re going to communicate along the way and pivot as needed.”

Yakuel: Is there a particular moment where you felt like this collaboration was this true dynamic duo that pushed the boundaries of what was possible?

Reich: I hope people have seen the new “When I Move, You Move” campaign. That was an opportunity for us to say, “We’ve got this amazing campaign going. We also have really big goals this year on performance. How do you think we should build this strategy out?”

We’d been doing some full-funnel work together for about nine months prior, but this was really the chance to say, “Why don’t you tell us what we don’t know? Should we expand into channels and partners?” We would never be testing The Trade Desk if it wasn’t for you thinking about video in a new way and saying, “We should maybe be buying programmatically and meeting consumers where they are and getting different cuts in front of different audiences and seeing how they resonate.”

Being able to measure that across the funnel and see the impact across the media mix is also something we weren’t doing until we came to you. We came to you for performance, but you were really the voice in our head saying, “You can’t have performance without branding.”

How do you see our relationship evolving? And what’s been effective?

Yakuel: One of the things I really enjoy about our relationship is a high level of transparency and candor. Nobody’s afraid to say what they think. If somebody had an opinion about something that everyone else held a different view on, they felt comfortable hashing that out in the room. And if somebody didn’t have the answer, they felt comfortable saying that and going and finding it and coming back once they did some digging.

That foundation of trust and people being comfortable being vulnerable with each other is something you personally demonstrated early on, and I think that’s infectious in a great way. And that’s also what ultimately achieves great results.

Reich: You also bring that trust and confidence to our leadership team. From the very start of launching a strategy, your involvement has helped build that trust, giving our team the confidence to meet with leadership and clearly say, “This is what we’re doing right.This is where we really should zig and zag and find something that’s going to create the ultimate KPIs and results we’re looking for.” The whole agency shares that viewpoint of “Let’s be honest and come together and say we tried this, it’s not working, what should we do next?”

Yakuel: Tell me a little more about how you think about creative — whether it be how you fund it and how important it is, or the actual creative approaches across things that are more studio cuts versus UGC-type of authentic experiences, and how does that impact the brand?

Reich: When we first started working with you, creative was the thing we never aligned on. We’re a luxury brand and we have this point of view that we need to remain luxury at all times. And then, really, you hit the buzzword, “UGC.” When you’re a luxury brand, that’s the scariest word that could exist.

Yakuel: Or “authentic.”

Reich: Those are the two.

Yakuel: God forbid we show up authentic.

Reich: Exactly. And as the platforms are evolving, if you don’t have UGC, you are not authentically showing up. We all want that buzzy word, “Gen Z.” They don’t want you to put something shiny and packaged in front of them.

That’s where Brkfst.io came in for us. You’re bringing creators to us to learn about our brands and what platforms we want to be on. We’re able to brief them and say, “How do we get in front of Gen Z, or even millennials, in the TikToks and the YouTube Shorts of the world, where it’s not this polished, perfect campaign video?” And then you get back to working with these creators on something that feels like the brand, but also feels authentic to the platform. It’s allowing us to go into even more channel expansion and to unlock new audiences that we’ve never been able to before.

Yakuel: Has there been anything that’s been a big surprise or an unexpected win in our work together?

Reich: The ability to work together in challenging times has to be one of the biggest wins.

Let’s talk about a moment where you and I were on opposite sides of the fence. For one of our brands, it was approaching holiday time, and we were seeing trends we didn’t love. I like risk, so my reaction was, “Blow everything up. Restart and let’s retrain the algorithm and do it quickly.” And I remember getting a call and everyone said, “Joe strongly disagrees.” And I was like, “Well, I strongly agree, so let’s chat.”

Yakuel: We’re all on the same team trying to do what’s best for the business, but we have different experiences and different tactics.

Reich: What came out of that was this beautiful moment where the teams said, “Our client’s a little bit crazy, is willing to push the risk. And we’re willing to come up with some real harebrained ideas because sometimes the best ideas come out of the craziest things.” I’m not saying everything we do is high risk and craziness…

Yakuel: …Or they come out of stressful situations.

Reich: It comes out of us looking at things from a different way. I’d love to hear your point of view on that.

Yakuel: The worst-case scenario is if we went through something like that, it didn’t work and we said, “Yeah, well, we didn’t think it would work” and you said, “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

It’s not that we knew the outcome and you knew the outcome — it’s that we both had thoughts and ideas and hypotheses. Let’s share them and talk about the pros and cons.

That’s where that push and pull comes from. I think the outcome was better than what it would’ve been if we didn’t say anything or were just like, “Sure, whatever you want.” And I think the same thing is true if you didn’t push back and we just did whatever we thought was best.

Reich: At the end of the day, you are really the person accountable for staying focused on long- and short-term goals. How are you encouraging your team and working with partners to really stay focused and aligned?

Yakuel: There’s two things that need to happen hand in hand. There’s tried-and-true things we know work almost every time. And then on the other side, there’s innovation. There’s stuff that either we tried once and it didn’t work and we want to try again or it’s something we’ve never tried that we want to test. You need to find that balance.

We’ll wrap with this last question: What advice would you give to other brands when it comes to building strong agency relationships?

Reich: No 1. is you have to foster that relationship from the very beginning. One of the things we did really well is when we celebrated coming together as partners, we had this beautiful dinner where everybody that was going to be working on the account came together, and we really got to know each other.

As someone who’s leading the way with the agency relationship, you set the tone. You’re going to have down weeks. It’s the way you lead through them and you communicate and encourage people through them and celebrate wins and bring people on journeys that’s most important.

I truly believe your team is part of my team and my team is part of your team. If you’re getting people and encouraging them across levels to be business owners and to really work with their counterparts from brand and agency, that’s the real secret to success in any category.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.