N Brown Group plc, the inclusive fashion and homeware digital retail group, has implemented its new Product Information Management (PIM) system in partnership with Akeneo – the Product Experience Company. The transformation, implemented ahead of the critical 2024 Peak Trading Period, has improved customer experience across its Simply Be, Jacamo and JD Williams brands.
N Brown, a top 10 UK clothing, footwear, and homeware digital retailer, takes pride in championing inclusion and serving the underserved. It focuses on ensuring customers look and feel amazing by offering customer-first buying experiences designed to deliver choice, affordability and value to its shoppers.
With an extensive range of products covering clothing, footwear, accessories and lifestyle products across multiple brands, N Brown needed a product information solution that could unify multiple data points to create cohesive and content-rich product information, helping guide customers to the right choice when shopping online. Additionally, N Brown understood the impact that data has on business success and how it can act as the keystone for future growth.
A foundational pillar of N Brown’s digital transformation strategy, which focuses on creating enhanced customer experiences in omnichannel buying journeys, Akeneo’s PIM solution launched on N Brown’s women’s fashion brand, Simply Be, in February 2024. This was followed by Jacamo in June and JD Williams in August of last year. The sequencing of the PIM implementation was completed in parallel with the roll out of N Brown’s new trading websites, allowing the retailer to feed product information across each of its strategic brands’ sites as well as their mobile apps, ahead of Peak 2024.
Customers across all three brands can now access all the information needed to inform their buying choices directly from product display pages, including detailed product descriptions, imagery, information on fabric type and garment care instructions. Additionally critical sizing information is enriched with metric and imperial garment measurements and comparative international sizing guides, allowing shoppers to overcome fit disparities between locales to improve fit certainty and help reduce return rates or size sampling behaviours. Social proof in the form of reviews and data on weekly product views and sales also give shoppers additional confidence, while the brands can now cross-sell products by offering recommendations for outfitting and ‘complete the look’ suggestions to provide a more immersive shopping experience.
“Our mobile apps have also benefited from enhanced PIM capabilities as well,” Peter Madigan, Head of Digital Product at N Brown, explained. “Our most loyal customers tend to use each of the brand’s apps, so whilst we’ve been able to bring new customers in through our new trading websites, and they’ve seen the advantage of improved product information, our most loyal customers get that same experience across our mobile apps too.”
Additionally, the new PIM solution allows the company to easily enrich product information at differing touch points across the digital journey – adjusting the tone of voice and content for target customers by brand.
“We know different things matter to each of our customer targets. For example, our Simply Be shoppers want to know the highlights of a product, while JD Wiliams customers look for a bit more inspiration. Jacamo customers, who are predominantly male, want to know what it is about the product that is going to make them buy it. Akeneo’s solution allows us to lean into those differing customer segments across the brands and present the information that is meaningful in the tone of voice that really matters to and connects with our customers,” Madigan commented.
By utilising Akeneo’s software to structure the flow of information to the website, product search on-site is more streamlined and precise. This removes endless scrolling and allows customers to focus their search efforts on specific garment attributes, delivering improved accuracy and relevance of search recommendations to enhance buying journeys while improving SEO.
Internally, the implementation of Akeneo’s toolset has transformed the process of managing product information, which had previously included repetitive, manual processes for the multiple teams checking, entering and enriching data.
“From a system and process perspective, everything is now much easier to use. We’re now at a point where amends, edits and updates can be done in a day and presented in front of our customer within a ten-minute window. That speed of change, reaction to market, feedback from product content – all the things that used to take a long time – can be done quickly and in a really controlled manner as well,” Madigan added.
Six months post PIM implementation, Simply Be has experienced increases across key metrics, as Madigan explained: “For Simply Be, we’ve seen uplifts in conversions and sell-through rates.”
Justin Thomas, VP Sales EMEA North at Akeneo, commented: “Product experience is the keystone for commerce and is especially critical for online retailers wanting to create customer experiences that drive conversions and loyalty, while also delivering profitable and sustainable growth. We’re excited to have supported this foundational stage of N Brown’s digital transformation as it embeds product experience at the heart of all its brands.”
