Dress Barn, not online yet, lays another brick in its web foundation

The Dress Barn, a women’s apparel retailer with 747 stores, is slowly adopting a web strategy. While DressBarn.com carries an announcement that buying on the web is coming soon, the company has adopted a customer relationship management system from Montreal-based STS, a division of NSB Co., to enable it to know what a customer does in every channel.

"While we were capturing customer information at POS, we had no single repository and our processes for accessing data were very manual," says Mary Beth Daniels, assistant vice president of database marketing. "We were sending out millions of catalogs per year and couldn`t measure how much traffic that drove into the retail store. We needed to better track our customers in order to develop targeted, thoughtful programs and successful cross-channel promotions."

STS will provide a central repository of customer information, so no matter how customers shop, whether in-store, by catalog, kiosk, or web, Dress Barn will need to capture customer information only once for it to be available anywhere in the business.