Targeting women 25 to 35 years old, Kate Spade Saturday has an extensive apparel and handbag line that touts bright colors and bold patterns. With a brand story that focuses on fun, Kate Spade Saturday has used customization to drive engagement, social shares and sales on its e-Commerce site.
Last year, Kate Spade Saturday celebrated its official launch by providing an interactive tool that enables consumers to design their own weekender bags. Within a few weeks of launching, the product customization page became the third-most visited page on the e-Commerce site.
The tool allows consumers to customize a weekender bag based on a variety of features, including colors, patterns and monograms, creating thousands of potential combinations and designs.
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“Showcasing product is extremely important to us, especially as customers in our target demographic expect to see exactly what they are paying for,” said Kristin Sebelle, Director of e-Commerce at Kate Spade Saturday. “The customization feature and dynamic image rendering is critical to meeting that expectation.”
Kate Spade Saturday incorporated dynamic media and personalization capabilities within the Adobe marketing Cloud to create an engaging and differentiated experience, Sebelle explained. “Customers are able to see their design in real time as they are customizing the bag and from multiple views. Showing the design exactly as you will receive it was our No. 1 priority when creating the experience.”
An Organic Discovery Experience
Sales and engagement rates for the customization tool have far surpassed initial goals, Sebelle noted. Both the small and regular size weekender bags have 4.5 or 5 star reviews, confirming that customers are happy with the results.
“The customized weekender is always one of our top shared products amongst our social platforms, particularly Pinterest,” Sebelle said. “And we are seeing a fair amount of referring traffic coming from those shares.”
As a relatively new brand, Kate Spade Saturday wanted to create an online shopping experience that also effectively told the overall brand story. The ultimate goal was to create a product “that allows the customer to express her individual brand style,” Sebelle said. Now the customization tool is “one of the areas of the site that our customer spends the most time on.
Despite the customization capability being one of the most popular components of its web site, Kate Spade Saturday concentrates its marketing efforts on the entire brand versus specific features.
“We haven’t focused a significant amount on marketing the customized weekender experience in our larger marketing efforts,” Sebelle said. “But it has been a part of our email marketing and blogger outreach programs, which have both been successful in helping gain traction of our brand and the customized experience.”
But for the most part, consumers are discovering the customization tool on their own, which makes the experience more authentic and enjoyable, according to Sebelle. “Discovery is happening on the site once the customer has learned about the brand. Based on the results we’ve seen, it gets a lot of traction with those customers.”