When retail experience is no help
Does it matter that the person soon to be in charge of transformation and technology at John Lewis doesn’t know anything about retail?
Zak Mian, a former Lloyds Bank director, has been appointed as new chief transformation & technology officer, as it gets to grip with the reality that quite soon, on line sales will be bigger than brick and mortar.
Mian has over many years’ experience of leading business transformation and technology teams, and was group transformation director at Lloyds where he led the digital transformation. And financial services can at least boast that it has rigorous processes when it comes to vendor management and project management.
It is this experience that overrides any lack of retail experience. Insiders will now that John Lewis has been in the grip of a few, long-standing tech vendors for many years now and has been unable to rein them in to serve the greater plan. The company also has significant legacy with management to boot, that has held the business back.
There has already been some criticism as to Mian’s lack of retail experience, but in the particular case of John Lewis, this looks, purely from the point of view of tech management and delivery, like a very sound appointment.
Despite economic headwinds, 71% of consumers plan to spend across Black Friday weekend
Despite ongoing economic turbulence and the financial struggles associated with the cost-of-living crisis, more than seven in 10 (71%) UK shoppers plan to spend over the Black Friday period, new research from Wunderkind, the leading performance marketing channel that scales one-to-one messages for retailers and brands, reveals.
Despite inflation reaching a new 41-year high of 11.1%, and with tax rises announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Budget threatening to put a further squeeze on household finances, consumers’ appetite for Black Friday hasn’t been dampened.
Original research of over 500 global shoppers in Wunderkind’s ‘2022 Consumer Insights Report’ found that with 71% still planning to spend over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday (BFCM) period, ‘Cyber Week’ is expected to grow 12% compared to 2021, as consumers bring forward Christmas spending and look to take advantage of the deals and discounts available to keep the festive period as affordable as possible. Mastercard’s SpendingPulse report, released on 15 November, has also predicted a significant rise in Black Friday sales.
Almost half (46%) of the shoppers polled by Wunderkind said they will be even more considered in their purchasing approach than usual during the Black Friday weekend by comparing prices to get the best deals, with 49% saying they will consider opting for Buy Now, Pay Later credit to help them spread the cost of purchases. Meanwhile, a separate survey of 1,000 UK consumers by Sensormatic Solutions showed 45% of shoppers will opt to buy Christmas gifts early to beat any future inflationary price rises.
“Price is the real watchword for consumers as Black Friday heralds the start of the peak trading season. For retailers, it’s clear that there’s a need to engage shoppers by emphasising holiday deals and special discounts, and they should be focusing marketing on budget-friendliness, while delivering brand-rich but value-driven messages,” Jon Halley, Regional Vice President at Wunderkind, said.
And, while demand for Black Friday deals is expected to remain buoyed, email is set to remain shoppers’ preferred communications channel, with almost two-thirds (65%) saying email communications from brands and retailers over BFCM will encourage them to spend. What’s more, 59% said email is where they will predominantly discover BFCM deals from their favourite brands and retailers.
“Our data suggests that consumers are not only encouraged to shop when receiving emails about deals from their favourite brands, but they actually welcome such correspondence,” Halley continued.
“The cost-of-living consumer is more price and promotions sensitive than ever before, and they’re both willing and waiting to be prompted and reminded about the Black Friday deals on offer. They will choose to spend with brands they trust, and it’s up to the retailers to showcase not only that they can offer value, but that they are on the side of the consumer during this stormy time.”
The growing conscience of the fashion-conscious: Sustainability and authenticity become key considerations for UK fashion shoppers
UK consumers are increasingly rating sustainability and brand authenticity as key consideration factors in their fashion buying decisions, the latest research from Centra, the headless commerce platform for fashion and lifestyle brands, reveals.
Original research of over 2,000 UK shoppers in Centra’s latest report How your brand can capture its full potential globally showed that while the product itself rated was the top consideration for 50% of consumers, key brand values, including fashion companies’ green credentials and how true the company is to its brand meaning, are emerging as growing consideration factors in consumers’ paths to purchase.
Almost a third (29%) said sustainability was a key consideration when shopping apparel, saying that to win their custom a brand needed to care about the planet as well as profit, rising to 36% of 18-24 year-olds. Meanwhile, a further quarter (25%) of UK fashion shoppers said that authenticity, where the brand lives up to what it stands for, would also impact their buying decision, rising to 30% of 25-34 year-olds.
Two thirds (65%) of shoppers say fashion brands need to ‘hard bake’ sustainability into their brand values and 70% say retailers should do more to bring their environmentally friendly values to life across their sales channels and touchpoints. With eco-fashion demands growing, 45% of shoppers say they would buy more from fashion brands who shout about their green efforts and a further 58% said they would buy more frequently from those retailers who commit to protecting the planet.
However 72% say sustainability claims must be backed up by meaningful action by a brand before they would consider changing their buying behaviours or switching their loyalty to a retailer, and 51% said that if they perceived a retailer to be ‘greenwashing’ it would give them a negative view of the brand. And while the CMA is already cracking down on greenwashing amongst fashion retailers, with ASOS, Boohoo and ASDA the latest brands being investigated by the regulator, recent research showed fashion businesses account for a quarter of all greenwashing complaints.
When it comes to authenticity, two thirds (64%) of shoppers now want the online experience to live up to the brand’s personality and values, which proved particularly important to younger consumers demographics of consumers, rising to 71% of 18-24 year-olds and 72% of 25-34 year-olds respectively. Over two fifths (42%) said that if a retailer’s online shopping experience didn’t embody the brand’s values, it would make them question their purchasing decision, while 39% said it would put their long-term loyalty to a brand in doubt.
Martin Jensen, CEO and Co-Founder of Centra, commented: “Fashion shoppers now quite literally wear their hearts – and their values – on their sleeves, and they are conspicuously consuming those brands whom mirror and shout about their own values and beliefs. So, when it comes to fashion, that means online experiences need to be at least as amazing as the products themselves and the brand storytelling needs to be consistent and authentic across each and every touchpoint. That way the retail can remain relevant and true to the core values of its own brand as well as those of its customer-base to drive sales and long-term customer lifetime value.”
Tech stack gaps risk hindering ROI – just 9% of retail CMOs believe their tech drives performance
New research from Wunderkind, the leading performance marketing channel that scales one-to-one messages for retailers and brands, has found that while retail Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have weathered the turbulence of the pandemic and the headwinds of economic volatility, many marketing leaders feel their legacy martech stacks are leaving gaps in their customer engagement capabilities – leaving potential revenue opportunities on the table.
Original research of over 100 senior marketing leaders in Wunderkind’s inaugural ‘CMO State of the Union’ Report found that 94% of retail CMOs regard the last two years as a critical turning point for marketers due to a combination of the pandemic, up-ended global supply chains, and a tumultuous economic environment. However, despite these challenges, almost three-quarters (73%) of CMOs say they were able to meet or exceed revenue projections during this period, and over half (55%) were able to increase their overall marketing spend.
However, while retail CMOs grasp the need to digitally transform their marketing capabilities to meet the new needs of consumers – and fully acknowledge the role of their martech stacks to build up first-party data and enhance customer engagement – the State of the Union report showcased that, without understanding how to fully leverage the technologies brands have invested in, CMOs could be missing out on revenue opportunities.
The report revealed that 96% of retail marketing leaders believe there is a gap in knowledge regarding their technology, while just 9% believe their tech strategy “greatly enables” their marketing performance. Only 5% believe their marketing organisation utilises their technology “extremely well”.
What’s more, 60% of CMOs admit that, while they are currently planning for a marketing landscape that doesn’t involve cookies, they aren’t completely confident regarding how to turn this preparation into a competitive advantage. This lack of understanding links to the fact that, according to the report, 78% of CMOs believe they have a good customer experience strategy – but their consumers aren’t in agreement. Consumer research has found that shoppers are largely dissatisfied with how brands communicate with them, partly due to CMOs being over-reliant on external channels and third-party cookies, and not putting enough focus on personalised, one-to-one engagement.
Consumers have become more demanding when it comes to expectations in their buying journey and how brands interact with them. Separate research of over 2,000 UK shoppers by Wunderkind has found that 62% feel brands and retailers could do more to build one-to-one shopping experiences, while a further 61% said they would be more likely to buy from a brand that personalised their engagement with them.
Richard Jones, Chief Revenue Officer at Wunderkind, commented:
“CMOs are now at a crossroads. Innovation has to continue in order to communicate the right message, maintain consumer loyalty, boost revenue, and reach digital maturity. While legacy technology has helped brands begin to reshape their marketing strategies, it has also created seas of disparate data and tools that aren’t talking to each other – ultimately impeding brands from unlocking additional tangible revenue streams.”
From insight to engagement – Bloom & Wild, Autotrader and the BBC on using data to drive CX
With digital competition intensifying and the cost of acquiring customers rising ever higher, we heard from a panel of digital commerce leaders at IRX 2022 on how they were leveraging customer data to improve buying journeys.
Moderated by Retail Connections’ managing editor and Fieldworks MD, Chris Field, the panel included Mairead Masterson, Director of Business Intelligence at Bloom & Wild, Autotrader’s Insights Director Nick King, Matthew Clark, Head of Architecture at the BBC and Kristian Burnard, Lounge Underwear’s Head of Ecommerce.
The session explored how retailers and brands can leverage data to build personalised and brand-immersive shopping experiences across each of their customer touchpoints.
Know when to communicate – but also when to say nothing
“It absolutely has to be a two-way communication between a brand and its customers – and customer feedback is crucial here,” Bloom & Wild’s Masterson told the audience. “That’s why we make sure customer feedback is embedded in everything we do, which allows us to create tangible relationships with our shoppers. And for us, sometimes that’s about knowing when to communicate and when to leave customers alone too.”
Based on customer feedback, the online letterbox flower retailer started asking customers whether they wanted to opt out of certain flower gifting occasions, such as Mother’s Day, if they found the day difficult. This allowed Bloom & Wild to communicate personally with its customers, delivering more thoughtful marketing that was sensitive to shoppers’ feelings.
Deliver value with each interaction
The BBC’s Clark said that while it was funded through the TV licence – and so didn’t have the same commercial model as the other retailers on the panel – delivering value to the listener or viewer via its online services was still paramount. “As an online service provider, we gather a lot of online data which offers lots of opportunity for personalisation and to deliver great value and experiences to our audiences,” he said.
Autotrader is also finding new ways to add value to shoppers’ interactions with the brand, it’s Insight Director, King, told us. The car selling platform doesn’t just sell cars to the 11.5 million UK consumers who visit its website each month but it also sells its services to the dealers who sell their cars through its platform too. And because it has a dual role, it has to ensure the data it harvests delivers for both audiences.
For this reason, adding value isn’t necessarily just about serving up product recommendations – it’s about educating the customers and the market. He told us how it is currently building services around electric vehicles (EVs), such as charging point maps that help make EVs more accessible to shoppers while educating them on the benefits of choosing electric; and at the same time it is using its platform to help car dealers build the EV segment of the market.
Choose your channel – but don’t expect customers to stay there
When it comes to channels, King recognised that consumers are channel agnostic: “you can’t force someone down one route – shoppers want to be able to do what they want to do, and how and when they want to do it. While that’s hard, that’s the secret to online trading and retailing well.”
Bloom & Wild is also changing up its channel mix – while it was born a pureplay, and saw a huge boost in demand for online flower deliveries during the pandemic, it is now adding IRL experiences into its offer, with wreath-making and flower arranging masterclasses, as well as its first pop-up store in Chelsea.
Put customers fully in control of their experience – and their data
Discussing the trade-off between privacy and personalisation, the BBC’s Clark told us that, unsurprisingly for a government-funded organisation, the broadcaster had to be “whiter than white” when it came to customer data and GDPR. Not only does it make sure that the customer is fully in control of their experience, but it is committed to making sure its algorithms don’t serve customers news or content that bias the customer’s view by narrowing the freedom to consume news and discover content.
Putting customers in control of their shopping experiences was also something Lounge Underwear’s Burnard highlighted. In the context of Lounge’s customers, this meant giving them the data to build confidence into the buying journeys, by helping them better understand sizing. It had been seeing growing levels of size sampling because its ranges featured so many cup and back sizes, so using sizing data from well-known High Street brands, such as M&S, they were able to offer up personalised size and fit recommendations to shoppers. This not only helped to put the customer in control, but it also reduced size-related returns by 425% – which not only improved CX but helped maintain margins.
Bloom & Wild, Autotrader, the BBC and Lounge Underwear were speaking at IRX, which collocated with DTX and UCX at London’s Excel on 12 and 13 October. For further information about future events, webinars and roundtables run by IRX, Internet Retailing’s event arm, visit: Events – Internet Retailing.
Sweaty Betty and Trinny London on how to build a tech stack for success
Last week, the Retail Connections team caught up with a panel of digital commerce leaders to explore how retailers can build the tech stacks needed for success. Speaking on the IRX Main Stage, gym wear brand Sweaty Betty’s CTO, Simon Pakenham-Walsh, D2C beauty brand Trinny London’s CTO, Taher Khaliq, and Founder and CEO of Patchworks, David Wiltshire, discussed the key elements and capabilities needed to build an agile architecture to drive forward growth and performance.
Build the tech that will deliver the business’ vision
“First you need to understand the business’ USP so you can ensure that the tech stack you are building will complement the organisation, its culture, its goals and its objectives,” Trinny London’s Khaliq told the audience. He suggested that how you define the business goals and vision should be your first point of call in defining the tech roadmap to achieve them.
Building a value chain also proved an integral stage in developing a successful tech stack for Sweaty Betty’s Pakenham-Walsh. He shared an example which ran from the Data Platform to the Customer Data Platform, which in turn powered the segmentation of customer insights to drive personalisation, and improve CX. This would then drive increased click through rates (CTRs) and build out bigger basket sizes and Average Order Value (AOV). He put it that you can’t begin to start talking about tech to drive up CTRs or AOV without that value chain in place.
Composition is key: Composable commerce and the building blocks for scale
Khaliq’s advice was to ensure you could build flexibility into the programme at the outset, saying retailers should “ensure that you have allowed yourself space for evolution within the roadmap, and that means not tying yourself to one tech stack.”
He nodded to when Trinny London first launched, and the challenge they faced was growing the customer base. They were so successful in rapidly scaling their customers, that they quickly recognised their current platform wouldn’t be able to survive in two years’ time. In response, they broke down the tech roadmap in to iterative stages in order to evolve as the business needed. “You will also need to assess what you can buy versus what you will want to build, understanding that you will need open API architecture to scale,” he added.
“As a multichannel retailer, we need to ensure that we have a unified set of touchpoints and that the data flow – and quality – is available from the central platform to each end state system,” Pakenham-Walsh told us.
“We need to ensure that data quality is there to move that information all the way through to the end customer touchpoint. We use composable commerce so we can build a roadmap for each of those elements of the stack.”
Start with the customer and work backwards
For David Wiltshire, Founder and CEO of Patchworks, the leading integration platform provider, tech stacks need to be reverse engineered from the customer. He advocated starting with the customer first and then working backwards so that every element of the tech capabilities support and enhance the shopper’s experience.
He also pointed to composable architecture, suggesting that those developing tech stacks should ask themselves how the infrastructure will be able to cope and scale in 5 years’ time, whether it can support internationalisation and offer customer support where needed regardless of global time zones.
People, not technology, drive success
The panel also suggested that it was the power of the innovators – the people behind the tech – rather than in the innovations or solutions themselves, that would drive forwards success.
“It’s the people behind the tech, not the tech itself, that will drive CX. The tech stack is simply based on the brains of those who built it. So, you need to understand that you can have the perfect technology roadmap, but if the people round the table aren’t innovators or up to the task, it’s not going to have a good outcome.”
Taher Khaliq, CTO, Trinny London
Another important element is simplicity, Pakenham-Walsh told the panel. Keeping it simple by “ensuring that there are the right partners and right people involved, and that they all understand the priorities when it comes to building out the tech stack” would be key to delivering tech that would deliver for the business – both now and in the future.
Sweaty Betty, Trinny London and Patchworks were speaking at IRX, which co-located with DTX and UCX at London’s Excel on the 12 and 13 October. For further information about future events, webinars and roundtables run by IRX, Internet Retailing’s event arm, visit: Events – Internet Retailing.
The enigma of agility – Dr Martens’ CTO on strategies for enabling fast-paced retail evolution
At IRX, which co-located with DTX and UCX at London’s Excel Centre this week, we heard from Dr Martens’ CTO & CIO, Ron Garricks, who delivered a keynote session on how brands and retailers could build organisational and technical agility in the face of adversity. With ruthless prioritisation, building a culture of agility, and ‘adapting, adopting and inventing’ (in that order), he outlined key strategies for retailers wanting to build agility into their businesses.
Change is a constant
“Tech isn’t a one-way trajectory,” Garricks pointed out as he opened the session on the first day of IRX. Technical teams can spend significant time and investment building out the tech road map that will perfectly mirror the business strategy. But as the business and the world around it shifts – from unforeseen macro factors (including the pandemic andcost-of-living crisis) to inevitable change driven by customers – the strategy won’t stand still. And that means tech road maps and the paths to their delivery can’t either.
When Garricks first joined Dr Marten’s three years ago, he inherited a business strategy and tech roadmap that had been penned by one of the large consultants. He felt it a bit too nebulous for his team to execute on, with the objectives being too vague to be realistically achieved and the path to achieving them hazy, making putting an actionable roadmap in place a challenge.
Instead, he advocated building more flexibility within both the strategy and plan to respond to the needs of change, with the roadmap needing to be agile enough to flex within the guardrails of the overarching business strategy. As he put it:
“It’s all about understanding that what gets you from ‘a’ to ‘b’ won’t necessarily get you to ‘c’ – and while we can make a path to follow, change is unescapable.”
Ruthless prioritisation
Dr Martens’ brand culture celebrates the authentic, true self, and internally its teams adopt the mantra that ‘you can do anything, but you can’t do everything’. This means ruthlessly focusing on the key actions or tech that become the most pressing to drive agility in the business. It’s about understanding not just what is important in the now, but being able to reassess and ask the question, if things change, how does my priority list shift, Garricks told the audience.
He pointed to the onset of the covid pandemic, which prompted the iconic boot brand to switch to a ‘survive now, grow later’ approach. This upended its IT infrastructure priorities. What was once lower down the list, such as migrating video conferencing capabilities and bolstering bandwidth to the HQ office to support VPNs for all staff, suddenly became mission critical.
Finding the balance
Being effectively able to build agility into a retail business also relies on the culture of the organisation itself, Garricks suggested.
“It’s about cultural behaviour – providing the framework for agility and giving teams and individuals the freedom to operate within those parameters, while striking the right balance between process, governance and innovation.”
This better positions the business to adapt and evolve to mirror, reflect and take action during periods of change.
And tech has a role to play here; bringing it closer to the teams and supporting closer relationships between tech partners and the business, will be a key conduit in evolution and instilling agility within an organisation.
Adopt, adapt, invent – and in that order
Garricks also talked about how businesses can learn from cross-functional teams or divisions in other locales and bring in best practice to improve agility.
He suggested ‘adopting’ improvements or untapped capabilities if you see something is working well, ‘adapting’ it if it needs to adjust to meet the business need or goal, or, if there isn’t anything that works, then moving towards ‘inventing’ – but he’s quite specific that it must be done in that order to the most business value and return on investment (ROI) to be realised.
Ron Garricks was speaking at IRX, which co-located with DTX and UCX at London’s Excel Centre on 12 & 13 October 2022. For more information on IRX’s future events, webinars and conferences, visit: Events – Internet Retailing.
FaceGym tones up customer engagement with a personalisation solution from Wunderkind
Luxury skincare and facial workout brand, FaceGym, has grown digital revenues and future-proofed its ambitions to rapidly scale the business, partnering with Wunderkind, the leading performance marketing engine that powers personalisation at scale for online brands and retailers.
Launched in 2014 by former Financial Times beauty and wellness columnist, Inge Theron, FaceGym offers a unique ‘gym studio’ for the face. Powered by high-performance, award-winning skincare and expert tool innovations, it combines its product offer with facial workouts designed to kickstart the skin’s metabolism to firm, tone, tighten and plump the face. With 11 physical studio locations globally, including London, Manchester and New York, FaceGym also offers its skincare ranges and workout kits via its Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) ecommerce site.
Having experienced fast-paced growth, with online sales rising 113% compared to 2021 for the year to date*, FaceGym wanted to capitalise on demand for its first-to-market beauty and wellness offer and future-proof how it would be able to scale its operations. It recognised that growing, owning and optimising its 1st party data – as well as scaling its email capabilities to keep existing shoppers nurtured and engaged – would be central to accelerating its growth trajectory.
By deploying Wunderkind’s identity resolution technology, FaceGym can now recognise and capture more of its online traffic, and so serve the right message to the right customer at the right time, based on their unique intent-based browsing behaviours, depending on where that individual is in their path to purchase. The beauty brand can now also run automated email re-engagement campaigns through the Wunderkind platform, with Cart Abandonment, Category Promotions and Price Drop alerts all helping to drive additional revenue opportunities. Wunderkind now ranks 4th among the beauty brand’s top paid channels, contributing 9.9% of FaceGym’s total digital revenues, and representing a 3.2x lift in revenue performance vs. the brand’s previous solution.
Sophie Rogers, Global Head of Digital at FaceGym, commented:
“FaceGym is a confidence-boosting business. We’re all about making our customers feel the best version of themselves – powered by high-performance skincare, tools & one-of-a-kind workout moves we provide a unique facial fitness experience for everyone, at every age. Wunderkind has helped us power personalisation so we can get under the skin of all our customers, across both the UK and US operations, to deliver personalised campaigns that are truly tailored to the individual shopper.”
“Wunderkind has been essential to the digital growth of our business,” Rogers added. “We have been so impressed at the impact Wunderkind has driven, particularly with our email capture and triggered email performance which has helped us to outperform our KPIs set from both a database and revenue perspective in as little as a few months.”
Wulfric Light-Wilkinson, GM International at Wunderkind International, commented: “Building on the success of its industry-first facial beauty concept, FaceGym is now powering personalisation at scale to consolidate its position as the market leader in skincare and beauty regimes. By choosing to grow and optimise its owned channels, FaceGym is future-proofing its ability to rapidly scale and grow digital revenues, while simultaneously boosting engagement and customer lifetime value.”
Cost-of-living consumers demand improved product information amid spending caution
With the cost-of-living crisis making each purchase more considered, six in ten (63%) UK shoppers want brands and retailers to do more to improve product information to support their buying journeys, the latest data from Akeneo, the global leader in product experience management (PXM) and product information management (PIM), reveals.
With consumer confidence falling to the lowest levels on record since 1974, according to GfK’s Consumer Confidence Barometer, the fallout of the cost-of-living crisis and the downward pressure on household incomes saw retail sales growth slow last month, with BRC-KPMG data suggesting sales of non-food sales fell -2% in the three months to August and total sales volumes also trending down. Consumer caution is also driving up price sensitivity among shoppers, with Retail Insight’s data sowing 69% are more budget conscious because of the cost-of-living squeeze.
“With shoppers becoming increasingly cautious with discretionary spend, every purchase is now a considered purchase, which means brands and retailers are having to fight harder for each and every conversion.”
James Barlow, Regional Sales Director UK&I at Akeneo.
“While pricing and promotions might seem an obvious area to address, often these are blunt tools which end up in a race to the bottom. This course of action does little to build loyalty, while putting greater pressure on retailers’ margins at a time when they are face inflationary rises across their manufacturing, supply chains and labour,” Barlow continued. “Despite price sensitivity, consumers consideration sets still span a wider set of triggers – from product information to brand values and sustainability. This means retailers need to consider how they speak to those conversion-prompting elements both within product discovery and at the point of purchase, lest they risk lost conversions and abandoned baskets.”
Original research of over 1,800 shoppers in its latest 2022 B2C Survey: Product Experience Satisfaction Around the World’ Report, showed that 62% of shoppers would abandon a purchase due to poor product information about an item being available, while two thirds (66%) would switch to a competitor if they deemed the product information to be poor.
Akeneo’s data also suggests this goes further than lost sales alone; 65% of shoppers would stop buying from a brand all together if product information was poor, because they would lose trust with the brand, demonstrating the impact on long-term loyalty if product experiences aren’t delivered. More than six in ten (63%) of shoppers now want retailers and brands to do more to improve product information to support their buying journeys.
For further information on the new ways shoppers now want to discover brands and the role of PIM and PXM in increasing conversions, CLV and loyalty, download the 2022 Global B2C Survey Report: here.
UNTUCKit powers digital transformation in partnership with YOOBIC
UNTUCKit, the fast-growing apparel brand, has streamlined communications, operations and training for store staff, freeing them up to focus on delivering standout customer experiences, in partnership with YOOBIC, the digital workplace solution for frontline teams.
Originally founded by Chris Riccobono and Aaron Sanandres because they couldn’t find shirts that looked good when untucked, UNTUCKit is now known for the refined product details – including length, hemline, and collar – that work together to create a shirt that remains casual, yet polished, when left untucked.
Known for its success as a digital brand, UNTUCKit has rapidly grown its bricks-and-mortar retail footprint since opening its flagship store in SoHo, New York, in 2015. With physical stores in both London and Manchester, the brand has developed a “click-to-brick” retail model to build customer loyalty and deliver compelling experiences, including the ability to see and touch UNTUCKit’s full range of shirts and other apparel.
As a fast-growth retailer, UNTUCKit recognised the need to digitally transform its business to meet the demands of customers who expect the same stellar experiences whether purchasing online or in its physical retail stores. In August 2021, the brand partnered with YOOBIC utilising its digital workplace solution as a single point of information for store staff, with a streamlined mobile app assisting them as they manage daily tasks, access virtual training, and give feedback and progress reports to their supervisors.
By unifying communications and task management in a single mobile app, UNTUCKit now puts all necessary tools and resources at store associates’ fingertips as they move around the sales floor or stockroom — a vital capability as the retail industry works to overcome talent shortages and high staff turnover. Mobile engagement features keep UNTUCKit’s team-members connected with their supervisors and with updates direct from HQ, helping them to stay up to speed on new policies, protocols, and product categories, and to roll out new in-store features quickly and consistently, such as merchandise displays or banners for new promotions.
The brand has created the UNTUCKit University within the YOOBIC app to provide employee training using bite-sized quizzes and videos — such as tips on helping customers to find their perfect fit — to keep employees informed without disrupting their workflows or requiring them to step off the sales floor.
The YOOBIC platform also gives regional managers full visibility into each store’s performance, training completion rates, and policy compliance, without the need to visit each store in-person — a vital force-multiplier as UNTUCKit opens new locations while ensuring consistent in-store experiences.
One year on from launch, 90% of UNTUCKit’s staff globally are using the YOOBIC platform daily and there has been a +70% adoption of mobile learning courses, says Brent Paulsen, Managing Director, Head of Retail at UNTUCKit.
“By partnering with YOOBIC we’ve found a way to put everything a store associate needs into their hand in an app. YOOBIC’s digital workplace gives our associates the support and tools they need to dazzle our customers and deliver consistent excellence every single time someone walks into the store.”
YOOBIC
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