CASE STUDY
MEET THE ‘PERFORMANCE
MONSTER’ HELPING A FASHION
RETAILER TO increase profit
How Apptus eSales helped fashion retailer, Stayhard, to increase profits by 1.5% - by staying
lean while finding innovative solutions to online retail’s unique challenges.
Since its launch in 2005, Swedish fashion retail brand, Stayhard, stands apart from the crowd. At the heart of
the business’ success is an acceptance that online presents unique challenges, which demand novel solutions.
Chief Operating Officer, Johan Davidsson, points to an experience gap between physical stores and online as
the core of the issue: “The big challenge online is not getting customers to the store, it’s closing them. Getting
them to buy at a level that is profitable”.
We love Apptus eSales! It’s a
performance monster that copes
effortlessly with peak demand, and
which allows us to approach the
eCommerce challenges in a new way.
JOHAN DAVIDSSON
Chief Operating Officer, Stayhard
THE CHALLENGE
For Stayhard, this central issue opens up a range of
challenges for online merchandising:
• How to drive sales by delivering an online retail
experience that is always relevant, for every
customer and every context
• How to see beyond conversion, to link product
exposure strategies directly to core business metrics
like revenue
• How to do all this without eroding profitability by
investing heavily in an expanded team
Johan explained: “We’ve always seen the complexities
inherent in an ever-expanding product range and an
increasingly diverse customer base as an opportunity.
But we also know that using that complexity to
understand customers, deliver the experience they
want and make more money requires a technology
solution as well as a human one.”
THE SOLUTION
Faced with these challenges, and having decided that
technology must play a key role, Johan and his team
set out to identify solutions. They assessed a number
of point solutions, each of which solved part of the
problem while adding a layer of unwanted system
complexity, before discovering Apptus eSales – and
were quickly convinced this was the right solution.
Through artificial intelligence-powered ecommerce
optimisation, Apptus eSales automates huge amounts
of routine online merchandising tasks. It draws on
behavioural data and machine learning to adapt
product exposure across recommendations, search,
navigation and more to individual intent in real time,
and frees merchandisers to focus on higher value,
strategic tasks.
What’s more, rather than focusing only on conversion,
Apptus eSales allows product exposure to be
guided by business metrics like revenue – with rich
performance feedback enabling merchandisers to
observe and understand how each strategy changes
customer behaviour.
“It was obvious Apptus eSales was the right tool,”
Johan said. “Not a small tool to solve just one
problem, but one tool to solve them all - to allow us to do
so much more and understand our customers better.”
The ideal solution is to treat every visit like a personal meeting, giving
every visitor a unique experience and one in which it is easy to find the right
products. That’s much easier in store than it is online where you only have
finite screen real estate through which to present a big range of products.
THE BENEFITS
Apptus eSales has become a critical component of
Stayhard’s success – not least its ability to realise
annual revenues of €20 million with a lean, twelve
strong merchandising and developer team.
“We love Apptus eSales,” Johan said. “It’s a
performance monster that copes effortlessly with
peak demand, and which allows us to approach the
eCommerce challenges in a new way.”
Specifically, Apptus eSales enables Stayhard to
make a virtue of the complexities inherent in an
ever-expanding product range and an increasingly
diverse customer base. The ability to understand and
respond to individual customer intent in real time,
without the need for specialist IT or coding skills, is a
genuine competitive advantage.
Johan explained: “We immediately saw sales go
up when Apptus eSales was in control of product
assortments. But, the great thing is we can observe
the impact and have learned a lot as a result –
sometimes people behave in ways that are totally
unexpected.”
Before Apptus eSales we could only
run one campaign at a time. Now we
run 50 campaigns at the same time
and analyse which of those performs
the best in real time. As a result, we
get incredibly valuable insight that
helps shape future campaigns.
It’s a similar story when it comes to campaigns,
according to Johan: “Before Apptus eSales we could only
run one campaign at a time. Now we run 50 campaigns
at the same time and analyse which of those performs
the best in real time. As a result, we get incredibly
valuable insight that helps shape future campaigns.”
Crucially, Apptus eSales is the only solution that allows
Stayhard to ensure product exposure strategies are
driven by business goals. “I love this,” Johan said.
“It’s such a powerful feature and very easy. You can’t
dig in and do that much by yourself, which in my
opinion is a big waste of time. Instead, Apptus gives
you a few controls - but they are the important ones.”
The ability to select whether merchandising strategies
are driven by high conversion goals or high revenue
goals is a case in point. “When we have a big sale, we
can live with having a lower profit,” Johan said. “We
can optimise our assortment for high conversion and
it’s a strategic decision. The rest of the time, we can
optimise all our assortment to give us more profit and,
using Apptus, we can see what actually happens,
which in turn makes it’s much easier to take business
decisions.”
The proof, or course, is in the numbers, and Apptus
has passed with flying colours.
“We ran a 60 day a test where we compared a
strategy that exposed products to generate higher
revenues and a strategy to expose products that led
to higher conversion,” Johan explained. “We could
very quickly see that the revenue strategy increased
profitability by 1.5% profit – and that’s lots of money if
you’re doing €20 million per year.”
ABOUT STAYHARD
•
Entrepreneurs Daniel Möller and Joakim
Naumburg launched the company in 2005.
•
Stayhard is one of Sweden’s leading
fashion players on the web.
•
In just eight years (2005–2013)
— without external capital injections —
Stayhard sales leaped from SEK 0
to SEK 105 million (USD 15.2 million; EUR
11.4 million).
•
Stayhard sells 150 brands and has
customers in 28 countries.
APPTUS
Apptus has been at the cutting edge of high-performance computing, search and navigation technologies, recommendation engines and online
behavioural analytics since its launch in 2000. Today its ground-breaking, AI-powered eCommerce Optimisation software – Apptus eSales – is
redefining online merchandising and enabling some of the worlds’ leading retailers to dramatically improve sales performance, reduce cost,
and drive organisational efficiency. A single, unified solution for intelligent product exposure, Apptus eSales draws on big data and machine
learning to constantly tune exposure strategies aligned to wider conversions, revenue and profit driven goals. It transforms previously reactive,
manual and rule-based merchandising – enabling automated, predictive merchandising that works with even the biggest product ranges to
display the right products in the right context at the right time. With a rapidly growing client base across the Nordics, United Kingdom, Germany
and the US, Apptus is headquartered in Lund, Sweden with offices in London and Munich.
[email protected] • www.apptus.com