Natalie Theo, Dressipi’s Style Director explores the meaning of Personalization, and how retailers can use it to create one to one shopping experiences for their customers that will delight and inspire them.
How To Create A Personalized Shopping Experience
‘Personalization’ is a buzz word in retail that will still undoubtedly be one of the hot topics going into 2018.
Creating relevant shopping experiences to every individual on a personal level will increasingly become a priority for retailers. How can true personalization be achieved and what does it take to capture one of the most challenging yet crucial elements, the emotional side of shopping and dressing?
Personalization starts with the customer and ends with the customer. It’s an opportunity for retailers to have an ongoing intimate conversation with shoppers 24/7, whilst gaining an understanding of:
- How they shop
- Whether or not they are confident when it comes to shopping
- How their lifestyle impacts purchase decisions
- What occasions they shop for
- What parts of their shape they find difficult to dress
- Do they enjoy following trends (or not)
These are all crucial data points that we continually capture and learn from, highlighting that putting the customer needs first enables us to create a truly personalized shopping solution for our retail partners.
Thanks to each customer’s unique and ever evolving Fashion Fingerprint® (their unique fashion profile) and the fact that Dressipi has the largest set of product fit and style data available in the world today, retailer’s products are mapped to a customer as if it were the result of that very intimate discussion she might have had with a personal stylist in real time.
For many retailers Personalization is likely to become a key focus in 2018. Firstly it represents an opportunity for retailers to empower better customer experiences, and secondly, increased revenue with a service that adds that ‘human touch’ to the customer journey and lets her know “we’re listening to you”.
We’ve always known right from the start that turning face to face real time personal shopping experiences into algorithms that constantly learn and evolve as the customer does, requires the style team and tech team to work hand in hand. At Dressipi, that’s exactly what we do.
Fashion is emotional and constantly evolving. How customers think of fashion changes with time, inspiration and context which is why our algorithms take into account fashion specific information updated daily by the style team. This operates on many levels:
- Reviewing outfit combinations
- Understanding how people shop trends
- Style rules sets around shape, garments and must have styles
- Ensuring we are keeping on-brand with each of our retail partners
We believe that these represent a key differentiator and enable us to truly innovate compared to many of our competitors’ purely click-based approach to Personalization.
Creating personalized shopping experiences reduces the search costs for consumers as we only show customers garments that suit their shape and style, instilling confidence in the purchases made. For example, with the outfits we automatically generate for each customer, they learn how to style something they might be thinking of buying and learn how make it work for different occasions. In addition, it champions versatility by showing how to wear a new purchase with something already in your wardrobe.
Below are two examples of the personalized outfit recommendations we provide on John Lewis:
Most importantly, no matter how confident or not a customer may be, Personalization inspires - it adds that element of fun to the user experience whether it’s through curated and personalized homepages and weekly style emails or simply through a spot-on style recommendation with a fashion twist.
If you are at the beginning of your Personalization journey and are interested in learning Five Things Every Retailer Should Know About Personalization, download our recent whitepaper by Dressipi’s co-founder Donna North.
Equally, if you are interested in a demo to see how we could provide our Personalization solutions for you and reduce return rates by 5% percentage points, Schedule A Free Consultation today.
Header Photo by Ewan Robertson on Unsplash