Fashion and lifestyle retailer FJ Benjamin has set up an advisory board to help the company integrate its brick-and-mortar stores and online sales channels.

The omni-channel advisory board will advise FJ Benjamin's management on strengthening links between new digital channels and the group's network of over 200 stores and 1,500 points of sale in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, the company said in a statement yesterday.

The advisory board comprises domain experts as well as senior FJ Benjamin executives. The domain experts are Mr Marcelo Wesseler, former chief executive of SingPost e-commerce and now managing partner of e-commerce platform developer Codem; Mr Jon Sugihara, head of global strategic partnerships at Google; and Mr Tito Costa, chief marketing officer at Zalora.

"We are pursuing an omni-channel strategy where we hope to harness our existing customer database in the region, which should have the twin impact of both optimising our regional network as well as growing our business volume online," said FJ Benjamin director of corporate strategy Ben Benjamin, who is also on the advisory board.

"We have observed the online ecosystem evolve rapidly over the past two years, including last-mile logistics, payments and mobile commerce, and feel that the time is now ripe to pursue an economically viable business model that will integrate the online ecosystem with our retail infrastructure."

FJ Benjamin manages over 20 brands - including Guess, Marc Jacobs, Nautica and Swarovski - and operates 226 stores. FJ Benjamin shares yesterday ended 4.3 per cent lower at 4.5 cents.

Correction note: An earlier version of this story was accompanied by a photo of Swarovski's ION store. F J Benjamin has since clarified that it distributes Swarovski elsewhere in the region but not in Singapore. The photo has been changed to reflect this.