Creating a Branded SharePoint Online Site for a Renowned Luxury Apparel Brand

Creating a Branded SharePoint Online Site for a Renowned Luxury Apparel Brand

Description

Founded in 2002, our client is a luxury apparel and accessories brand renowned for its comfortable silhouettes and high-end fabrics. They carry both men’s and women’s collections with a focus on creating mid-priced, luxury basics. The brand is distributed across approximately 40 countries at over 2,400 distribution locations, which encompasses both their wholesale and direct-to-consumer businesses.  Our client is widely distributed at upscale department stores such as Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, as well as at their direct-to-consumer channels, including 40 retail stores, 14 outlet stores, and an e-commerce site. With corporate headquarters in New York and a design studio in Los Angeles, our client aims to capture a global audience.

Previous Situation

In 2013, our client spun off as a publicly-traded company from its parent brand Kellwood Co.  With the transition, they needed a new way for their corporate offices to efficiently communicate with their retail stores in order to optimize their marketing investments and facilitate growth.  

Communication between the corporate headquarters down to the retail stores was mainly via email, which proved to be slow, inefficient, and quickly outdated.  Important announcements and collateral, such as latest price sheets, product briefs, merchandising guides, etc. were often lost within emails since they lacked an organized, central location to store and distribute necessary information.  Oftentimes, new campaigns and product offerings were miscommunicated, or unclear, and misprinted collateral was not only costly but delayed the execution of in-store campaigns.  Additionally, the information needed to be parsed manually at each of the region-specific distribution points making the entire process time-consuming and laborious.

As is common in the retail industry, high turnover rate and short-term staffing models added to the challenges. Email communication would be sent to stale email addresses, critical information would live inside an individual’s email where it wasn’t accessible to the rest of the team, and there were inconsistencies in getting new staff trained and up-to-speed effortlessly.  Moreover, with store-level teams working in shifts, information was difficult to distribute to all team members consistently.

Results

Speridian worked closely with our client’s team to create a customized Retail Communications portal that simplified and streamlined communication between Corporate Retail Headquarters and our client’s broadly distributed retail stores.  By creating a branded SharePoint Online site, all retail stores could quickly and easily log-in to access their role-appropriate Marketing, HR, and Operations information from anywhere and any device.  

Instead of distributing documents via email and storing files under individual accounts, Speridian created an intranet system with dedicated resource pages that allowed different teams to have real-time access to the latest reports, documents, collateral, calendars, directories, and more, in one centralized location. These resources were also accessible to new hires, which reduced the level of effort and costly hours that were spent on-boarding high-turnover roles.

After gathering the business requirements, Speridian also standardized and set up custom, automated workflow procedures to improve productivity.  Region-specific materials could now be distributed with ease and helpdesk requests and feedback to Corporate teams could now easily be ticketed and handled effectively. Utilizing Speridian’s Retail Communications solution, our client continued to expand their operations without compromising the level of communication between the corporate headquarters and the retail stores.

Campaigns can be executed with increased frequency, consistency, and quality while maintaining the highest return on investments. Stores can quickly give feedback to Corporate, making errors easier to remediate and increasing overall productivity and innovation.  With more campaign flexibility and agility, our client can improve their competitive advantage and have more control over the customer experience with optimized marketing campaigns.  Organized processes and ability to track metrics enabled smarter decision-making for future campaigns, leading to customer loyalty and operational efficiency.