Wunderkind Success Story: J.McLaughlin

Speaker 1: (singing)So we are a apparel and accessory brand for both men and women. The brand is over 50 years old. I might need to go back and edit that. The brand is over 40 years old. It's really just lifestyle apparel, classic, timeless, that Americana lifestyle brand, and our customer is 40 to 60. They like the nicer things in life, but not flashy, not trendy. They just really appreciate quality in every aspect of their life and I think they also like the neighborhood vibe of the store, too. We don't like to be in malls or necessarily on Main Street, so we kind of want to make sure we always blend into the neighborhood, have that very much boutique feel, and our customers really appreciate that. Yeah, that's J. McLaughlin. It does, and I think with how many new features are coming out these days or new ways to advertise, it's always important to have that foundation and really understand how your customer wants to be communicated to. I think we have a really good understanding of her and him so that we can really offer them that and I think the neighborhood piece of things was just super important, of course, during 2020 and COVID just because there was that level of comfort and a much more intimate shopping experience, which of course lent itself to the period we were in. We have been over the past five years, I would say, really, really building into customer acquisition, definitely putting a lot more focus on it and just wanting more people to get to know the brand. I think that brick- and- mortar is a great way to do that, but of course online digital is a great way to do that. Now the problem is you have all these visitors coming to the site and if you have a higher AUR and it's a new customer, you're not going to necessarily convert them on that first visit. That's just not reality and I don't think that was our goal. It was just to engage them. I really liked what Wunderkind brought to the table, not only of course the recognition piece to the technology, but also a very customizable approach to how we can retarget the customer in a softer way than I think anybody else we had looked at was really offering. There were just some really innovative techniques to kind of get the customer to pause in their session and interact, whether it be to opt in to email, for them to send items in their cart to them as a follow- up, so it was just a very thoughtful approach to how to engage the customer after that initial visit, and that's what we were really looking for at that time. Yeah, absolutely. When you think about a sales associate, if a new customer walks in for the first time, they browse around, and they might not make the purchase that first time, but if you can engage them in a way that feels relevant and then you have that follow- up after, " We just got some new arrivals in we thought you might like," or, " We have a promotion going on, did you want to come back in?", it's the same thought process that we're trying to emulate, just digitally. So I think everybody was trying to make sure that their gifting options were made available earlier because we knew that shipping necessarily and fulfillment times weren't totally back up to the normal pace, so right there was that kind of getting started earlier period, and then I think just being super transparent with the customer just about shipping windows and when you could get it there by and cutoff times. Then, of course, when you get into the promotional aspect of it, we don't like to go on sale all the time. We're definitely not a promotional brand, but when we're on sale, we're on sale, and we want it to feel super elevated. We want it to be super easy to shop, and that's always been our approach to any sale period, whether it be spring summer sale or Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We don't necessarily do these kind of ad hoc one- off days, adding additional discount or specific items. We see it more of as a update to the creative, " Let's get some fun branding out there, a one- day marketing campaign change- up." So that's always how we approach it. It's another sale. That's really what it is. No, I mean I think it's, of course, a peak sales period and you always have to prepare for that, but we've had just really great full- price momentum Q1 and anticipating it for Q3. So again, it's not something that we're going to approach like we have to make up for business in that period, so we'll just present the customer with the best experience possible, and that's kind of how we're going into it. The service at Wunderkind is also probably, it's tough, one or two, but it's the best I've seen across our tech stack. They're always coming up with new ideas for gifting quizzes in SMS or, " Do we want to create a sales segment so that we can tailor the marketing accordingly?" I think that the customer segmentation capabilities and just the thinking outside the box and bringing in creative ideas from across their portfolio and what they've seen working for other people, different tests that they have running brings a lot of value to the table, and definitely leveraging segmentation more. We've done a pretty good job building out our own internal CRM system, so we have a really robust amount of first- party data, and I know that you guys can tap into it so that we're gift- giving customers that content, sale customers that content, and then of course, just full- price winter wardrobing, just giving that customer really relevant content because there's so much messaging going on at that time of year. So I feel like everything is impacting everything nowadays. A lot less visibility into that first introduction to the brand and then what makes somebody necessarily stay with the brand. So for us, our own channels, our own marketing mix, we definitely like to lean on content versus commerce, definitely storytelling, making sure it's very diverse from a content perspective. It could be taste- makers, it could be profiles of friends of the brand, our CEO's top picks, and in a variety of formats. It could be just video, it could be reels. We're now dipping our feet into TikTok, so I think it's just important to always be authentic, but also to not be afraid to try new things because I think the customer is so active across so many different platforms now that just being there and being top of mind and not necessarily trying to make the sale right away, it's refreshing, it's engaging, and I think it's how people want to basically find out about new brands and talk to brands nowadays. That's definitely been our approach. Then, of course, I think when you get into more of the paid aspect of it, of course, it's a little bit more conversion- driven, but always being cognizant that you're trying to get the customer, not the sale, and I think that's always been the motto in stores and definitely something that translates into how we approach our digital marketing mix. So we have a very big catalog, direct mail component to the business, and for me, email and Wunderkind has always been the digital component of that. If you can get somebody to stop and open an email and take the time to then click through and come to the site, that's a pretty big win. That's a lot of time that somebody has taken out of their day to engage with the brand and email and Wunderkind has really been a huge component to that. What I love about Wunderkind's design and their flexibility for customization is that it doesn't always feel like such a triggered message. It almost feels like a soft marketing message, which is what we were aiming for, and SMS was a really nice addition to that. We, of course, have the trigger component to that, but I always like to ask myself, " Why am I sending this text message?" If I can't answer that question, then we shouldn't be sending the text message. So we've used it now for announcing giveaways, announcing new collaborations, sometimes not even driving to the site, driving to our Instagram page, so we like to definitely use SMS as a very unique, almost top- of- mind urgent messaging for us, a little bit different than email, which is a bit more crafted and of course a little bit more product- focused. But SMS is just to me another way to really engage with people that really want to hear from you in a very sort of top- of- mind, relevant way, and it's really been working for us. It's been really great for gaining new followers and just to engage our really loyal customers that really like to hear what's new with us, what new store is opening, so it's been a really kind of helpful and added tool to the whole mix. I did, I did a little bit because our customer, our core customer can skew a little bit older, so I wasn't sure how they were going to respond just to, of course, it's just one more piece of information that they're giving you, which I think nowadays people can be sensitive about, and then just how were they going to when we actually started using it. It's one thing to opt in, it's another thing when you start to get the text. But we've had really great success, low opt- out rate, and just really nice engagement. I think we use it as we should, so pat on the back. But I think that's why they've responded so well is because there's purpose behind it that doesn't feel like just pushing product. Well, of course, there's the recognition piece that we touched on before. I don't think that that can be overlooked because again, if you are trying to make that customer, not that sale, then you do need to know how to reach that customer after the visit, so that's at the core. But I also think the diversification of the different programs and campaigns, you have things that are very behavioral- driven, and then you have things that are product catalog- focused, so there's just a very wide range to the campaigns that are offered. Then just, I mean, I also think really relevant product tracking, so just because somebody was browsing something once, it doesn't necessarily mean you want to see that in every single email after that, and I think there's that very good understanding of what behavior is relevant on the site and what behavior we don't need to worry about because especially at gift- giving time, you're looking for a gift for somebody one time and it's like you get 20 emails after that featuring men's socks that wasn't necessarily relevant browsing and I think Wunderkind does a really good job of recognizing the type of traffic that you can model on and the behavior you can model on and the behavior that is one- off or not consistent with the user's overall kind of searching and browsing patterns, so that's also been just really, really a great and refreshing approach to the tech. I mean, conversion for a Wunderkind email campaign, I mean, I would say is 3X to 4X what the average sort of site conversion or just call it a batch- and- blast marketing email would be. We were pretty heavily reliant on marketing emails before going live with Wunderkind and we've really been able to shift the volume so that it's almost an even split now between trigger catalog volume versus the marketing emails. I think they still serve a purpose, but to not be reliant on that and to be able to then play around and test with different segmentation on that end because you know that you've got the foundation being driven from the Wunderkind campaigns has been huge. I mean, opt- in rates, our email file has grown threefold I would say since we started and the value of an emailable customer is much, much higher than one that is not. So I think it's all of those things compounded. It's gaining, we're driving more customers to the site, had a much better opt- in experience, getting more email subscribers, the value of that in conjunction then with a very robust trigger campaign that could drive much more revenue, definitely much more higher revenue percent than our previously historical reliance on the marketing emails. I mean, well, we talk every month, but again, we're a lean in- house team, so we've quite a few partners. It's not only, of course, coming to the table to give us updates about business performance and just current trends, but it's also the coming to the table with ideas, then not only, " Are you guys having ideas?", but it's like, " Okay, is this something you guys would be interested in? Let us mock up a few ideas for you guys. Let us see how other people are approaching this, what's worked for other clients so that everything becomes much more actionable." It's really easy to have a lot of ideas all the time, but to actually get them to fruition when you have a small team is tough. I can't even tell you how many A/ B tests we've been able to run or new creative that we've been able to launch or creative refreshes. We just did a whole design refresh on all of our trigger campaigns and it's that level of service and I think probably having your additional resources and expertise in- house that basically feel like an extension of our internal team and when that happens and you have that reach, all of a sudden, it's so much easy to keep momentum and keep trying new things and keep adding to the overall portfolio, and I would say that the service to me is number one, it's definitely the thing I value the most. To me, testing is probably one of the most overlooked things to be doing because it's usually time- intensive. You have to set it up. You have to decide, " Okay, what am I trying to test? What are my goals here?" You have to get statistical relevance, so usually, it has to be going on for a little while, and then you have to, of course, do the analysis, do the hindsight. Normally, it's a, " Okay, we'll test this." It's one and done. But to have an always- on approach to that is very rare. A lot of times we think we know how the customer is going to react to something, or we know this is going to be the winner, and more often than not, we can be surprised by it. To me, that has been one of the biggest wins. I mean, I would say we are running at least two to three tests at a time, always on, and I just can't emphasize enough, understanding how your user is going to necessarily react to one experience versus another in real- time and then being able to optimize towards that, it's a pretty good winning combination. So I have to say that piece of it's not just one thing, it's the constant always- on approach to testing that's really moved the needle in a lot of ways, and that could just be frequency of sends, it could be promoting the product that they were browsing at the top versus integrating it in with the product grid, it could be subject line testing. There's just a lot of different ways that the team comes to the table with ways to constantly improve, and to me, that's just been the biggest win. It's funny because we still look back at that initial kind of benchmark, and at this point, you can't even look at it anymore because we've far exceeded it. I think we far exceeded it within the first few months of going live. You want to find partners out there that can understand your resources in- house, understand your strengths in- house, and basically tailor their experience and what they're bringing to the table based on that, and that's what Wunderkind does, and they're a part of the team. (singing)