Sponsored Post: Part of our Vendor’s Voice series to present and promote selected partners’ activities.
WHAT DOES YOUR COMPANY DO?
When a brand or retailer builds its launch-to-market plan, it takes multi-team coordination, intricate processes and complex planning to ensure the new launch, campaign, or collection is a success. The “buzz” of digital has now tasked Marketing & Communications professionals with separating the gimmick from the game changer. For over a decade, we have been helping multichannel retailers, brands and agencies identify these game changers.
We provide the technology, data insights and tools that retailers and ecommerce companies need to accelerate their business and build lasting exposure. We offer software and data tools to help our clients manage critical stages of their launch plan, including sample management, event management, influencer marketing, digital asset distribution and most importantly, the data to help measure the success of those activities.
WHAT IS YOUR USP?
We’re the only technology and data analytics provider in the B2B space specialised for retailers, brands and ecommerce companies in the fashion, luxury and cosmetics industries. We help companies connect real-time data with real-time experiences to provide efficiency, visibility and exposure when they are launching their products or campaigns to the market.
Using our proprietary technology tools and data resources our clients are able to understand their audience, connect to activate their community and benchmark their success. In addition to the data our systems allow a business to understand about their company; Launchmetrics’ customers have access to data from the 1.8 million websites we track daily, 100,000 key influencers we monitor, historic advertising and editorial benchmarking data of over 3,000 companies over the last 10 years, among other critical information needed to make informed business decisions.
Whilst there are some companies who could be considered competitors with some of our individual software products there actually isn’t any other provider in the B2B space that provides brands and retailers with a 360 degree programme such as ours.
WHO ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS?
Today we work with more than 1,700 brands worldwide. Some A-list clients include Burberry, Christian Louboutin, NET-A-PORTER, Shiseido as well as Fenwick’s, Levi’s, Adidas, Topshop and Uniqlo. We work with fashion, luxury and cosmetics brands & multichannel retailers – everything from high street labels and luxury designers to boutique vendors and larger retailers.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE ECOMMERCE/MULTICHANNEL MARKET?
Our biggest success when working with ecommence and multichannel brands is our ability to reduce the time it takes them to get their products to the market so that they have a longer on-sale period at full price. Our sample management tool, employed by some of the leading companies in the industry, means that brands can track the individual location of each item to reduce the time spent looking for products as well as cut loss by 95%.
We recently deployed our sample management tool with a global retailer based in Italy. After implementing this new system, the company was able to see cost savings of £250,000 annually, between the number of products pulled out of inventory for Marketing/PR purposes, Product & Sample loss as well as the reduction in human resource time wasted on these activities.
WHAT INTERESTING NEW FUNCTIONALITY ARE YOU PROVIDING RETAILERS?
In addition to the technology we are providing our retail clients to streamline how they manage their inventory and samples, we are now working closer than ever with the Marketing & CRM teams to help our customers understand their customers better. One of our most exciting new data projects allows us to help retailers identify influencers within their customer base. Working with the CRM team we were able to build digital profiles of their customers and understand who these people were, what they were interested in and if/who they were engaging with. As companies are spending more and more budget on these activities, it is our aim with this service to allow them to activate those influencers who already have an affinity with their brand, but perhaps are unknown to them. Our findings help the client understand that they actually had a lot of influential people in their database that they didn’t even know were customers. Harnessing this information, we found that when working with these influencers, it yielded a result that was four times more powerful than a traditional Marketing & PR campaign.
LAUNCHMETRICS IN BRIEF
Founded:
In 2015, Augure, an infl uencer marketing software and data
company, and Fashion GPS, the premier technology provider for the
fashion industry, merged to become Launchmetrics.
Global reach:
The company is headquartered in New York with offi ces
in London, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Tokyo.
Customers:
More than 1,700 retailers, brands and agencies globally
use Launchmetrics to power their business.
Contact:
For more information visit www.launchmetrics.com, email
info@launchmetrics.com or call 020 7434 4381.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Kate Spade & Company has been a Launchmetrics Samples client since 2014. The company designs and markets accessories and apparel principally under two global, multichannel lifestyle brands: Kate Spade New York and Jack Spade. With collections spanning demographics, genders and geographies, the brands are intended to accent customers’ interesting lives and inspire adventure.
Kate Spade’s main challenges were found in ensuring that all sample trafficking records were centralised in one convenient system that would ensure the ever-growing demand for samples was being met in the most efficient way possible. Kate Spade simply had an outdated system that did not allow for an extensively detailed paper trail. With the old system, sometimes samples would go missing, which was costly for the business: “Each sample is unique and it doesn’t just belong to one team. If one thing goes missing, it affects all aspects of the business,” says Grace Adams, PR Manager, Kate Spade.
There was a need to digitalise PR efforts and streamline data into a meaningful and useful information system. Launchmetrics Samples met all the needs, including seamless migration of Kate Spade data into the Samples platform. Since thousands of samples are being produced and archived by Kate Spade every year, it was essential to have a reliable and powerful system. As samples are always moving between departments, as well as to-and-from external parties, Kate Spade needed a system that would allow them to track the location and name of the person with the sample at any time.
Launchmetrics provides a system that produces unique barcodes to track down each individual sample, rather than one that produces one barcode per style number. The reporting features in Samples provided Kate Spade with pertinent metrics, such as the ability to view the most requested samples per season, available inventory, etc.
The most significant result was seen in Kate Spade’s costs. These have been significantly reduced since implementing Samples. With the help of the system, it quickly became more difficult for unique samples to go missing. Samples can now be located more efficiently and easily, allowing them to move faster between departments and accelerating the process from Design to Sales. Using the tracking capabilities of Samples allows for a higher number of sample requests to be fulfilled, increasing the potential for PR opportunities – Kate Spade can now easily analyse which samples are in high demand for both internal and external opportunities, essentially allowing them to optimise their seasonal strategies. Furthermore, employees no longer have to rely on stacks of paper, hundreds of emails, or numerous Google docs in order to track samples, increasing productivity and team collaboration.
“It’s simpler and more reliable to track samples though Launchmetrics Samples rather than solely relying on human information. Having a concrete paper trail and sample trafficking history streamlines the sample process in many ways. When sharing a limited sample set between departments, the more detailed information you have, the better,” says Adams.
Sample tracking is just one of the many solutions Launchmetrics provides for its clients. To find the right solution for your business, please contact: info@launchmetrics.com.
