Tapestry Weaves Ultra Personal Shopping Experience into Its Ecommerce Platform

High-end customers want a personalized experience when they shop. Why? Because of all the benefits digital technology delivered when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Staying safe was paramount but buying from the comforts of home, finding a wider array of options than in stores, and experiencing fast shipping contributed to online shopping mania. With customers stuck at home with nothing to do during the pandemic, online shopping soared by 43 percent in the first year of the pandemic alone.

Online shoppers also became used to up-to-date product information, search suggestions, clear sales and promotion information, and user-friendly shopping carts. However, in 2022, the pandemic appears to be abating and the long-term effects of the initial shock in lifestyle change are becoming apparent.

The past two years offered lessons to retailers, especially to luxury retailers that needed to take a hard look at enhancing consumer experiences and engagement, no matter where they were shopping. This is because the luxury sector relies on a well-designed, high-touch, in-store experience since high-end purchases are, in essence, emotional investments. The “touch-and-feel” senses disappear from online shopping. However, even though stores are now open, customers have come to like the ease and other benefits that online shopping provides them.

In turn, customers want to see that the retailers they shop with know what they previously bought, what their preferences are, when they like to shop and, above all, care that they shop with that retailer. This means that retailers need to snap to and do everything they can to create and keep a customer loyal…or they will quickly lose them since buyers are switching brands at unprecedented rates.

Picking through the tangled webs of customer data

Tapestry, a global house of famous luxury and lifestyle brands including Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman, paid close attention to this shift in customer behavior and knew it had to make some changes. It wanted to ensure its consumers had a seamless buying experience, from start to finish. It wanted to give its customers digital personalization so unique that they would keep coming back. For example, Tapestry’s Kate Spade customers, many of whom are like Kate Spade herself, are known to be authentic, full of originality, adventurous and above all, fashionistas. This group likes the brand’s handbags because they are sleek and colorful. Since Kate Spade’s target market is women with high purchasing power, these are not customers Tapestry wants to lose.

But Tapestry had a huge challenge to overcome before it could make this happen—its customer data was not only scattered across multiple sources in the enterprise, but also all the customers’ characteristics were hard to pin down. For example, people would use different names for themselves in different places, make typos, change their email alias, phone numbers, and even their home addresses.

In plain terms, Tapestry’s customer data was a mess. And the organization needed to fix it fast if it wanted to keep both its upscale and lifestyle customers coming back to shop for more.

Bringing order to chaos at warp speed

Tapestry tapped Amperity, an AWS Partner, that had a widely known Customer Data Platform (CDP) designed specifically to make sense out of disparate data, to help. Powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Kinesis, Amperity’s CDP quickly grabbed each individual customer’s data from across the organization and consolidated it, giving Tapestry an accurate and real-time 360-degree view of each customer.

With a solid grasp of each customer’s identity, the organization could go much deeper into customer analytics, gaining fresh, new insights, such as the breakdown of new customers and their product lifetime value, among others. Tapestry could also up its personalization and engagement tactics and deliver omnichannel customer experiences, giving both its lifestyle and high-value customers the fully integrated and delightful experience that they want from the comfort of their homes.

Tailoring offers and recommendations for the fashion-conscious

With a whole view of each customer, Tapestry was able to greatly improve its customer experiences and targeting. For example, individual customers now receive promotions tailored specifically to them, with messaging that resonates with their buying preferences. Or, when they call into customer service at one of Tapestry’s brand’s online sites, the call agent knows the customer’s history, making them feel appreciated and nurturing loyalty, which grows lifetime value.

“I’m excited for Tapestry’s continued growth through the smart adoption of new technologies and by simplifying ways of working. I’m also excited for our proposition and content offering to evolve to deliver a truly personalized experience for our customers,” said Gary Cassidy, CRM Director/ Europe, Tapestry.

For more information on how Tapestry gained crucial traction in ecommerce, read the case study.

AWS Partner Spotlight

Amperity is an enterprise customer data platform built for customer-centric brands, with a suite of products that addresses the full spectrum of customer data challenges, from identity resolution to assembling and accessing the elusive customer 360 to uncovering and activating customer intelligence that matters.

Website: https://amperity.com/