Glossy held its inaugural Hot Topic event this week, convening brands in the fashion, luxury and beauty industries to discuss data strategy and break down how they’re using data to enhance performance.
For retailers, the more data they have at their fingertips, the better they can understand their consumers, come up with strategies and be more personalized and targeted with product and marketing pushes.
We asked brand and retail executives to share how they are using data to personalize and customize the e-commerce experience. Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Hannah Hendler, director of operations, Caraa
[Personalization is] not something we actively think about. We’re 90 percent direct-to-consumer e-commerce, but our product is such a specific item, it’s really customized as is anyway. We don’t do any paid advertising, we do our own in-house PR. We try to keep everything on-brand across our platforms, and we have a high Instagram conversion rate. The actual e-commerce experience on our site is not that personalized, but our item and inventory count is pretty selective. We did our first studio bag through market research with 500 women around the country. Our design model is very involved with our consumer. We don’t believe in the concept of the old-school designer going off to their fashion house.
Lisa Berger, vp of business development, 24 Seven
It all goes back to data. There’s a new role that we’re seeing: the retail analyst. At a place like Goldman Sachs, these roles are normal, but inside of a luxury retail brand, that hasn’t been the case. These analysts are looking at data daily, along with their retail, marketing and operations teams and making sure there’s a specialized approach for their customers in areas like e-commerce. There’s a focus on real-time selling, in which brands are doing things like texting consumers to let them know there’s a size two dress waiting for them, which is packaged up and ready to go. Finally, the data strategy mindset has been socialized. It’s been idle within brands in retail, but I think brands are ready to make moves and are finally listening to the customer.
Dalia Strum, chief content officer, The Current
We come to brands with innovation strategies so we can help them, but it needs to come internally. We can’t say, “This is the strategy you should internalize,” because it will either get approved or disapproved, and then falls off their radar. If we come to them and start motivating the process internally, it’s more effective. An example of this is a hackathon that we’re doing at Coach next weekend. We’re helping them think through innovative e-commerce strategies and how they can be implemented quickly.
