Involved user experience design, email marketing, customer personas, and strategy.
Jill Stuart has been around for 25 years as a B2C company selling to consumers high fashion pieces, mainly highlighting their dresses. Coming in at the beginning of the internship, I was to help the company become more consumer facing, to understand their customer, and to help market towards them through their eCommerce platform and other avenues.
Began by analyzing Google Analytics, their Shopify reports, and department store reviews, I created a comprehensive consumer analysis within the first 4 days of the internship. I presented this to their sales team, marketing team, design and production team, and the Chief Strategy Officer of the company.
Instead of finding out who the Jill Stuart girl is, we wanted to find out who the Jill stuart girls were. I segmented the customers into 3 categories for now, with room to expand and iterate.
As more research was conducted, looking at Google Analytics affinity categories, Shopify buying behaviors, and emailing list segments, we realized the Jill Stuart girl can't be categorized into one person. We have:
The Socialite: Data pulled from Google Analytics affinity categories showed women who are fashionistas, beauty mavens, theater aficionados, and like to travel. Instagram Audit also revealed her deep food, beauty and fashion interests. Tagged Instagram posts showed women who are traveling, attending friends' weddings, or weekend getaways with their girlfriends to upstate New York.
The Working Lady: Tagged Instagram posts show women who are constantly working, product reviews reveal women have a motivation to find garments that are work appropriate but can easily transform into after work outfits due to their limited time to change or shop.
The Sample Sales: Google Analytics and emailing campaigns show that Jill Stuart girls are value shoppers. When holiday sales come out or old collections get discounted, shoppers are likely to purchase. Sample sales receive a lot of attention due to our higher price point.
Through the quantitative data on Google Analytics, more than 50% of our users are on mobile devices and our mobile responsiveness does not allow users to check out which is a large pain point for us.
Problems:
Goals:
Due to the fact that our wholesalers make up 90% of our revenue stream and eCommerce hits 10% and dropping, I took initiative to look into who each department store customer is. Each department store has it's own sets of customers and the department store "buyers" purchase Jill Stuart according to those customers (In the Fashion industry, buyers are those who stock the department stores and decide which Jill Stuart pieces they want to sell). If we know who our department store customers are, we can design and market our pieces for that target audience.
Since we have weekly selling reports from the sales team detailing which dresses get bought and sold in the stores, as a user experience design, I worked with Sales to figure out who these individual consumers are, what their buying behaviors are, and what motivates them to buy.
Department Stores:
*Big buyers, those who sell the most Jill Stuart in their department stores.
Goals:
Each pair of images below showcases Instagram posts from customers who tagged the department store and posts from the actual store's account ( respectively) with insights on both images. This is to guage how their customers market themselves and how the store markets and brands themselves.
Highlighted phrases represent qualities that appear in multiple department store customers.
This internship experience has taught me volumes about collaborating with various deparatments of a fashion company as well as how to research data points on our consumers. Throughout the experience, I came in willing to learn and willing to grow, which allowed me to take full control of my role as User Experience Designer. Due to my freedom in my role, I determined for myself where the company's pain points were in terms of consumer data and took it upon myself to analyze Google Analystics data and our Shopify platform to find weak spots.
Due to time constraints, I am unable to conduct extensive user survey's and user interviews but as a workaround, I have transfered my efforts to their Instagram page. I have worked with the sales and production teams to formulate relevant and fun questions to ask on our Instagram stories to drive social media engagement as well as gain insight on our consumers.
Moving forward, I would advice the company to leverage this consumer data to target their marketing, social media engagment, and elevate their SEO. There are various data points that I was researching, from demographics to buying behavior. I would advise hiring a developer to opitimize our eCommerce platform to be more competitive and intuitive to use.
