To succeed in an omnichannel world, retailers need to break down the silos between their marketing, merchandising, operations and finance departments. By removing these boundaries, businesses can improve communication and collaboration, and share data more effectively across the organization.
REVOLVE, a fashion e-Commerce retailer, is eliminating business barriers by implementing OrderDynamics’ Dynamic Action application, which analyzes data across a retailer’s organization, and outlines immediate, detailed actions that can drive profit. In REVOLVE’s case, the retailer needed to better connect the dots between item-level exposure, customer return rates, pricing and inventory levels.
Selling more than 500 men’s and women’s brands, REVOLVE strives to provide the most trendy brands while also driving bottom-line results. But sometimes, specific brands and products are difficult to find. An even larger conundrum arises if the most in-demand brands and products are unavailable. Both cases can lead to lower average order values and sell-through rates, which impacts overall sales and revenue.
Advertisement
“REVOLVE strives to be first to market with the fashion industry’s most coveted emerging and established brands, ” said David Pujades, COO of REVOLVE. “Our product assortment is unparalleled — that’s one of the reasons our customers love REVOLVE, and it’s how we keep them engaged. In order to drive conversions, however, we must ensure that we have enough depth and availability for our best-selling brands, particularly with brands that are in high demand.”
Within the first week of using Dynamic Action, REVOLVE identified more than $2 million worth of inventory that received minimal customer views, leading to significant overstocks.
Since deploying Dynamic Action and applying key recommendations, REVOLVE was able to increase product views by 15% per week over a four-week period. The retailer also has seen a 60% increase in return on capital for overstocked products, and experienced a 20% increase in sell-through for products that previously were not selling sufficiently on the web site.
Turning Data Into Business Opportunities
Typically, consumers visit the REVOLVE site to search for specific categories and brands. REVOLVE also focuses extensively on curation, so consumers can access product aggregations from multiple brands based on specific aesthetics, lifestyles, trends and occasions. This has led to some products getting lost during the browsing journey.
“Social media is also becoming a very meaningful way for our customers to discover our products, as well as the fashion styles, aesthetics and trends we identify,” Pujades said. “With this, the complexity around successfully managing supply and demand has increased drastically.”
Rather than making educated guesses, REVOLVE now has the ability to “better understand and react to misalignments between product traffic and inventory positions and unlock a wealth of insight,” Pujades said. “We can understand the potential opportunities where our planners can buy deeper because we have the views to sustain additional product buys. We can also identify products selling slower than expected, identify potential reasons for it and correct them.”
The REVOLVE team can understand the correlation between site views and inventory by specific marketing channels, customer group, brand and category, Pujades explained. Through Dynamic Action, the retailer has access to “opportunity lists” that “pinpoint disconnects in our business. It helps our team stay focused, with weekly recommendations for action that are prioritized in terms of revenue and profit.”
OrderDynamics’ practice management team also provides a series of insights and data-driven advice regarding potential areas of improvement across channels, according to Pujades. Working together, REVOLVE and OrderDynamics identify patterns and trends in data that potentially lead to strategic projects within the business. “Typically, we focus on short term opportunities and action lists one week, and then focus on longer term strategic initiatives the next week.”
With its recent acquisition of Alliance Apparel, which owns of the Lovers + Friends, Tularosa and NBD brands, REVOLVE is bringing some of its most popular brands under the company umbrella, Pujades noted. “This will allow REVOLVE to quickly fill holes in the marketplace when necessary, allowing us to have a stronger pipeline of product.”
