Alex & Ani, Rent The Runway Share How They Customize The App Experience
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of retailers invest heavily in content. Whether it’s high-quality images, blogs, or ratings and reviews, brands and retailers are embracing content to create more enriching online shopping experiences.
But how can content be scaled and applied to mobile experiences? During the FD Mobile Show (#therealFD), executives from Rent The Runway and Alex & Ani shared the role the mobile is playing in their business, and how they’re differentiating their mobile experiences with cutting-edge features and capabilities. For Alex & Ani, digital is at the center of the entire organization. Ryan Bonifacino, SVP of Digital explained that because the brand was developed to focus on personalization at the product level, Alex & Ani’s digital strategies are designed to keep pace with that vision.
“Data is directly in the middle of the business so all decisions we make are based on testing and data,” Bonifacino told the audience. “Although we have different divisions, our digital team doesn’t operate in silos.”
This cohesive, all-in approach ensures everyone is on the same page and can collaborate and communicate effectively. Alex & Ani’s latest project is a mobile app, which is set to release this summer. The digital team is educating the store teams on the app, its features, capabilities and overall value for consumers. “We learned that mobile apps could do things in the store that we didn’t think they could,” Bonifacino said. “For example, imagine someone is waiting in line at a store. What if we could share details on the products in the display case as they’re waiting?”
Alex & Ani also is trying to recreate the in-store experience through the app and its other digital experiences. For examples, store associates — called bar tenders — can take out different bangles and arrange them for consumers, so they can create their dream bangle stacks. “You have an unlimited amount of combinations,” Bonifacino said. “People buy a lot of product online, so their carts are huge but they can’t see how the products look together. We want to simulate the effect to show what a stack looks like and allow consumers to see all angles of those stacks.”
Rent The Runway also is experimenting with different mobile features and capabilities. Andrew Fernandez, Engineering Lead of Mobile, noted that the company has an in-house development team of about 60 people.
“We can come up with a feature on Monday, prototype it on Wednesday and release it on Friday,” Fernandez said. And if a new feature doesn’t stick or resonate with consumers, it’s scrapped.
After launching its app, Rent The Runway spent a year developing and it further by leveraging customer feedback and winning organizational buy-in.
"We don’t put any features that are brand new into app unless we go into up to through revisions of the feature and through user testing,” Fernandez said. “The more feedback we get from customers, the easier it is to get the exec buy-in if something goes right, and the easier it is to kill something if it goes wrong.”
For example, Rent The Runway launched a recommendations quiz and dress finder feature. After realizing the recommendations quiz was more popular and getting more traction, the company scrapped the dress finder feature.
Moving forward, Rent The Runway is working towards linking its mobile notifications with app pages and the actual e-Commerce site. With this strategy, the retailer will be able to send customized notifications for specific products. When a customer interacts with the notification, she can be directed to the specific product being promoted. Rent The Runway also is striving to further curate the e-Commerce experience by incorporating user-generated images that align with consumers’ personal tastes, styles and body types. “We think (having these images) is a more powerful statement than a model wearing a dress,” Fernandez said. “We’re trying to integrate content without too much opinion on fashion because we feel that, at the end of the day, customers are going to choose what aligns with their own style.”