Adopt Stylitics, and give your customer the opportunity to experience your assortment in an entirely different way.
— Tim Baxter, CEO of Express
Discovery shopping helps create consumer confidence that can double conversions and boost AOV. Successful brands like Express are already using Stylitics to achieve billion dollar sales goals—read on to see how.
The “Inspiration Gap”
It’s an age-old truth of retail that showing customers the versatility of a product—helping them visualize the many ways it may be useful in their own lives—drastically increases their intent to purchase. Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck understood this selling psychology as far back as the 1880s, and for decades shoppers have turned to the editorial content of their favorite publishers for inspiration and to discover new products.
These two words, “inspiration” and “discover,” are still on the top of smart retailers’ minds. In fact, nearly 100% of all fashion brands invest some portion of their budget into inspirational content, but despite that investment, less than 1% of fashion products sold online are presented this way. Less than 1%!
If we have understood the power of suggestive selling for over a century, and if companies are already sinking their valuable marketing dollars into creating this type of content, how can we account for such a minute percentage of product benefiting from this smart, proven strategy? This is what Rohan Deuskar, Founder & CEO of Stylitics, calls “the Inspiration Gap,” and there are two hurdles that have made it virtually impossible to cross—that is, until now.
Nearly 100% of brands invest in inspirational content, but less than 1% of products are presented this way.
Bridging the Divide
The barrier companies have faced in executing quality inspirational content for their products comes down to two simple business concepts: cost and scalability. Until Stylitics, brands have only had two choices in creating their product content.
Option one was the intensive cost and time of manually styling, shooting and producing editorial content, which produces beautiful results but is impossible to scale across more than a handful of skus without becoming prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.
Option two is the lackluster solution of AI, which can populate product pages with upselling suggestions at scale, but the result of which is wholly uninspiring, as far as consumers are concerned. Worse still, poor presentation can actually have an eroding effect on brand equity and cause consumers to lose confidence.
As the old adage says, “Fast, good, or a great value? Pick two.” The good news? Stylitics delivers on all three.
Quality and Quantity
Editorial content works, but as a result of the above challenges, too many companies are attempting to find a lesser solution to what we all already know is effective. The fundamental difference between Stylitics and other ecommerce-solution products is also a fundamental value of our company—quality.
Our innovative products are driven by the goal of providing scalability at a non-prohibitive cost, without sacrificing the editorial quality that we know moves the needle (and the customer) to confident conversion.
This “quality” is an elusive trait. Often we know it when we see it, but it can be hard to define just what it is. Stylitics knows that the heart of quality content is storytelling, and that is what our products are designed to do. We inspire confidence in customers by helping them see your products in the context of their own lives, from occasion to occasion, pairing with items they may already own, or items they’ll be inspired to own.
The benefits of this storytelling edge are many, but key among them is that with the editorial content Stylitics can provide, customers begin to see your brand not just as a place to find individual products, but as a place to find inspiration, the grail that has eluded retailers for so long. And inspired customers are customers that are confident enough to convert.
The fundamental difference between Stylitics and other ecommerce-solution products is also a fundamental value of the company—quality.
The Express Route To Success:
A 360 Approach
This “holy grail” of retail may seem like the stuff of legends, but luckily we have a multitude of happy clients (over 100 of them) who can share cold, hard facts. One such success story is Express, a brand which hardly needs an introduction, and that now boasts multi-billion-dollar revenue.
One of the keys to Express’s success has been an ongoing partnership with Stylitics to create editorial content that greets the customer at all touchpoints, creating 360-degree discovery shopping opportunities. From PDPs, where Express has implemented Stylitics tools to showcase versatility and suggest outfitting options, to paid and earned social, where followers can discover not just single items but entire wardrobes, to site galleries and featured shops that showcase seasonal heroes, to email, where customers are provided with inspirational remarketing content that helps them see the versatility of a purchased product, Stylitics has helped power a transformation for the brand.
“A lot of people chase whatever shiny penny comes along; they invest in a lot of things that don’t necessarily change the experience for their customer,” explains Tim Baxter, CEO of Express. “Adopt Stylitics, and give your customer the opportunity to experience your assortment in an entirely different way.”
The Stylitics experience has resulted in material gains for Express. To date, nearly 100% of products on-site are presented with outfits (quite an improvement from the industry metric of 1%!). That equals over 7,000 editorial-style outfits live on site, which have pushed conversions to double the average rate, and boosted average order values significantly, as well.
Join the Retail Revolution
Express is just one of over a hundred retailers that have implemented Stylitics tools and seen first-hand the excellent results our unique discovery content can provide. What started as an e-commerce breakthrough three years ago has now become mainstream technology for the world’s leading fashion, fitness, beauty and lifestyle brands, and is on the way to becoming universal. Our best advice for success? Set your brand ahead of the curve.