Boden: winning online with tech innovations
With more consumers than ever moving to online shopping, apparel retailers have struggled to replicate the ‘try and buy’ model that shops have proved so useful for pre-pandemic. However, online fashion retailer Boden has seen personalisation technology start to buck this trend.
The retailer has seen a 5.1% lift to incremental revenue during Q1 2020, plus a conversion rate increase of 2.6x from shoppers using True Fit, a personalisation platform for apparel and footwear retailers, on its site.
The retailer also reported a 56.6% jump in order rates, a 12% increase to average order value (AOV) and a 5.9% reduction in returns for shoppers who followed True Fit’s recommendations.
Renowned for its bright, patterned clothes and quality, casual basics, Boden was founded by Johnnie Boden in 1991 as a mail-order business. While still retaining its traditional catalogue, the omnichannel retailer now has a flagship store on London’s King’s Road and concessions in select John Lewis stores across the UK.
However, 95% of trade takes place online across the UK, Germany, Austria, France, Australia and the US.
Boden set the business objective to improve the digital customer experience, which led them to a data-driven personalisation strategy for new and existing customers across their ecommerce channels. The retailer partnered with True Fit to strengthen shoppers’ confidence about fit, reduce high return rates and minimize size sampling behaviour.
This strategy proved timely for the retailer as demand for both ecommerce personalisation have accelerated significantly driven by the disruption caused by Covid-19. True Fit data shows ecommerce traffic for UK fashion retailers was up 25% and total number of orders up 47% to pre-Covid 19 rates in August. In addition, consumer demand for personalisation rose to peak levels month after month over the summer.
True Fit and Boden worked closely to implement True Confidence™, which eliminates the fit and size guesswork by providing high fidelity fit and size recommendations based on each consumer’s personal preferences. True Fit’s recommendations are powered by its Fashion Genome™, the world’s largest connected data set for fashion, which analyses transactions from 17,000 retail brands and data from 190 million registered shoppers.
Nicola Huet, Director of Digital Trading at Boden, explains: “Our customers are at the heart of everything we do and empowering them to find clothes online that make them feel their best is crucial to ensuring customer confidence and loyalty. Our goal is to provide our customers with an experience that instils the same confidence when purchasing products online as when wearing our brand. Personalisation helps drive that experience and, in turn, has demonstrated tremendous impact on the business.”
“Ecommerce is a key channel for Boden. We saw positive results almost immediately and the impact of True Fit has been substantial,” Huet concludeds
Jessica Murphy, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at True Fit, adds: "Successful retailers like Boden understand the importance of placing data-driven personalisation at the heart of their customer strategy. Our mission at True Fit is to instil consumer confidence and loyalty and we are excited to partner with Boden on this shared objective. We look forward to working with the Boden team as they continue to deliver delight to their diverse customer base at every point on the digital shopping journey.”
via https://AiUpNow.com October 21, 2020 at 06:16AM by Paul Skeldon, Khareem Sudlow,
