An e-Commerce retailer with a growing brick-and-mortar presence, natural cosmetics beauty brand 100% PURE sought to acquire more consumers, improve its in-store experiences and more accurately measure KPIs such as traffic and conversion rates. With the help of in-store analytics solution provider RetailNext, the cosmetics brand now can track shopper preferences, enabling it to add personalization to its customer experience.
Personalization is the “low-hanging fruit” that 100% PURE is using to attract customers that may only visit one of its channels, according to Rick Kostick, CEO and Co-Founder of 100% PURE.
“With this shift to e-Commerce, a lot of people are really scared of retail right now,” said Kostick in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “You have to make retail an experience and you have to personalize it in order to succeed.”
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Initially founded in Napa, Calif. in 2005 as a pure play e-Commerce retailer, 100% PURE opened its first store in Berkeley, Calif. in 2006. The retailer then opened its second and third stores in 2010 and 2012 respectively. In 2014 and 2015, the company opened nine more properties, but it has since focused on improving in-store operations rather than expanding its footprint.
Kostick estimates that e-Commerce generates approximately 70% of sales, while the brick-and-mortar stores drive only 15% of sales and partner sellers make up 5%. But he believes that the stores are the company’s best customer acquisition tool, and the 100% PURE team wants to drive new traffic to stores in order to increase sales across the board, by recommending the right products at the right time.
“It was my theory early on that the omnichannel customer was going to spend more with our brand than a customer that was singular channel,” Kostick said. “The theory plays in that if they come into our store, we can give them that experience which makes them have a tighter relationship with the brand. Of course, some days customers are not going to want to go to the store, but if they’ve been to the store, they know the product that they want to reorder and they just reorder through the web. But then later on, they’ll want to see what’s new and they want to experience it, so then they’ll come back to the store.”
Heat Maps Optimize Merchandising To Turn Stores Into Theaters
Merchandising is key to the success of the 100% PURE brick-and-mortar experience, and the retailer leverages the heat maps provided by RetailNext to optimize product placement on the store floor.
“You can tell where the customer is going in the store and what areas they’re interested in,” Kostick noted. “That’s important now when you need to make your store into a theater. If there’s an area of the store that’s not really interesting to the customer, you need to change it up. You have to immerse the shopper once they enter the front door.”
The data also helps 100% PURE gain a greater understanding of purchasing patterns in different channels. For example, Kostick pointed out that while makeup and color cosmetics products are purchased more online, the in-store consumer gravitates more toward skin care products. Although one may assume that shoppers would be more interested in purchasing makeup in the store after they try it on, Kostick noted that there is more of a human element attached to skin care products. Shoppers looking to take care of their skin health are likely to be more interested in getting a consultation from an in-store staffer, he said. With personalization now included in the 100% PURE offering, the brand can leverage data to suggest products that fit both in-store and online shopping criteria.
The retailer plans to improve its personalization capabilities even further so that it can start basing its experiences on individualized shopper conversion rates. Kostick noted that the retailer will begin to focus on building out new stores after successfully implementing personalization at the granular level.