Stores are the beating heart of the Levi’s® brand experience. Retail locations are where fans are able to interact directly with Levi’s® product and improving every facet of the consumer experience is a priority to Levi Strauss & Co. Managing these stores without the right data is tough, but we now have a solution. Retail Insights is our new custom-built app that provides stores, districts, countries and clusters with intelligent data — on the go, whenever, wherever.
Developed for the stores by the stores, the app was originally born in Europe after managers requested better visibility into how their stores were performing to make informed decisions and adjustments.
Built on a modern tech stack, Retail Insights pulls sales, inventory, and product performance metrics into an easily accessible mobile app, which provides store managers with the data they were asking for at their fingertips. This allows more time for managers to stay on the store floor and engage with customers instead of retreating to the backroom to access data files and check performance metrics and inventory.
The application is hosted on the company’s new cloud-based Data Ocean, a robust data repository on Google Cloud built by the LS&Co technology team. The app’s cloud-based infrastructure enables capabilities that managers have come to love, including:
● Sub-second latency which ensures instant response times when a user clicks in the app
● Near real-time intra-day KPI data within the app specific to sales and store traffic
● App reliability and performance during peak shopping season
With up-to-the-minute data, store managers can now make adjustments faster on everything from merchandising to staffing and compare their store performance to other locations to see where they can improve. Seeing one store or district exceed sales expectations of an item at a certain time gives other stores a chance to learn from that and replicate successful practices.
“I like to use the app to compare my store’s performance with similar stores,” says Las Vegas store manager Christine Funches. “It allows my team and I to level-set and create bolder goals for ourselves. I encourage my team to reach out to those stores who are seeing success to gain best practices.”
The ability to access conversion data in real-time also means store managers can quickly identify opportunities and ask important questions like: Why do you think we are having a conversion dip in the last three hours? Do we have the right coverage and people on the sales floor?
Feedback from the pool of early store managers using the Retail Insights app in Europe was tremendous and continues from new users as we roll it out around the world. “Retail Insights really gives us the option to not only stay connected on numbers as a leadership team, but it also helps us explain it in a better way to the stylists,” says U.S.-based assistant manager Alex Edwards. “It really helps us with goal setting, tracking, and truly seeing where we are throughout the week.”
Retail Insights is now an essential part of measuring the pulse of LS&Co.’s retail stores and will continue to evolve as we pull in more data and functionality.
So what’s next? Like most of our applications, we’re always looking to add new and enhanced features. The team is now looking to optimize the user interface and metrics and is looking to roll out the app in Asia and Mexico.
In addition, our data science and AI team is working to make the app even smarter, using machine learning to cluster stores for benchmarking sales, and conversion data with sister stores to continually improve performance. While the app currently reports on real-time data, we’re also working with our data science and AI team to bring more predictive capabilities to help stores better understand what they should be selling more of in the future. Our vision is to move from historic and real-time reporting to future looking insights that drive actions (and increased sales) in the stores.
The Retail Insights app development is an example of LS&Co.’s culture of innovation and journey to use technology to drive better, faster and more efficient work with the goal of creating a consistent brand experience for our fans, whether they’re shopping in store or online.
