Apparel & Accessories
With many ways to win online, apparel sites thrive by choosing the right one

IRWD2010 Conference

Internet Retailer Best of the Web 2006

Anthropologie.com
EddieBauer.com
Junonia.com
LandsEnd.com
Macys.com
Talbots.com
Timberland.com
Tommy.com

Apparel sites can go broad and deep, boasting big assortments--but they must then wrestle with guiding the shopper through it all to find what she is searching for. Or they can focus in on the highly specialized--but to thrive, they must connect with that narrower audience, and foster in it the loyalty that sparks repeated purchases.

Category winners in Apparel & Accessories this year represent both ends of that spectrum. Take Lands' End, an Internet Retailer Top 50 winner for the seventh consecutive year, a distinction shared only by Amazon. With 3,500 products and an online assortment spanning multiple SKUs of each, finding their way might be daunting for shoppers who don't already know exactly what they want going in--were it not for the fact that LandsEnd.com continues to excel at guiding shoppers through the process.

"A lot of retailers lose out because they don't do a good job of making what they have on the site visible to customers," says Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president at Retail Forward Inc. "The sites that have a better shot at ultimately converting customers are those that give them a good starting point." LandsEnd.com tackles that problem with powerful site search functionality and shopping tools that help sell, backed up by some of retail's best customer service.

EddieBauer.com helps _customers choose by integrating editorial content such as fit guides and information on fashion trends right into product pages. "We've learned from our customers that content is important to the shopping experience," says Mark Staudinger, vice president of international and e-commerce operations. "So rather than put editorial content in a microsite or shift it off to the side, we apply the content directly to the product page." That intelligence is gleaned from ongoing _usability testing, something for which EddieBauer.com has developed a regular methodology so as to keep consumers happy--and keep itself in the forefront of its category online.

Apparel site Junonia.com targets the specialized customer group of plus-sized women. Though the audience segment is limited, Junonia has nevertheless grown to $10 million in sales over the past several years with a formula that engenders loyalty and a sense of community among customers. Founder and CEO Anne Kelly fosters a one-to-one relationship with customers, with a photo on the home page, a link there to her e-mail address and product developments that reflect customer comments.

Lands' End, Eddie Bauer, Junonia--and all the other Apparel category winners--show that while there are many ways to win online, success is a matter of finding and staying with the approach that works best for them and their customers.

Here's a tough assignment: Cultivate web sales through mostly organic growth driven by a unique collection of merchandise. Present that merchandise in artistic arrangements that tell a story about products, making them subtly engaging to shoppers. But don't over-emphasize ease of shopping or plan on appealing to a universal audience.

And at the end of the year, show that web sales have doubled at least two years in a row.

Welcome to the world of Anthropologie.com, which expects to double sales this year over 2004, says Ranjana Sharma, manager of e-commerce. A lifestyle site as much as a retailer of women's and girl's apparel and accessories, plus selected home furnishings, Anthropologie sells the experience of shopping the world, Sharma says. "Our customers would like to go to different places in the world and pick out things and find the story behind them, but they don't have the time, so we do it for them," she says.

Anthropologie tells the story in the way it presents merchandise. The site uses an unusual collection of products, ranging from apparel and handbags to couches and window treatments, to engage customers. It then coordinates product presentations and provides different ways of viewing each item, with dresses that shoppers can click to see on models, or lampshades that can be zoomed in to see the details of a decorative weave. "The graphics and photography reflect the eclectic spirit of Anthropologie's merchandise and make you want to buy," says Keven Wilder, owner of retail consultants Wilder & Associates in Chicago.

Every other week, Anthropologie changes about 40 collections of images that make up a page, to present fresh and fashion-forward merchandise displays, with no pricing or promotional material, just images of its apparel and other products in appealing scenes. Clicking on a category or product link takes a shopper to one or more of these creatives on the way to a buy page--a merchandising tactic that at first worried Sharma, but turned out to suit Anthropologie's strategy of telling a story about its products. "We were concerned that we were stepping beyond a basic rule of e-commerce by making customers add clicks to get to a buy page," she says. "But in reality it has helped our sales."

Providing editorial content about fashion trends, care of fabrics or fit guides is certainly nothing new to online retailers that sell apparel. But what sets EddieBauer.com apart from the crowd is how it integrates the editorial content into its product pages.

“We spend a lot of time focusing on our content,” says Mark Staudinger, vice president of international and e-commerce operations. “And we’ve learned from our customers that content is important to the shopping experience. So rather than put editorial content on a microsite or shift it off to the side, we apply the content directly to the product page.”

A product page for down products, for instance, includes fashion tips for wearing down. Fit guides are included on all the jeans pages and information about care of fabrics is woven into applicable product pages. Integrated content is one of the things Eddie Bauer has learned its customers want. “Over the last 12 to 18 months, we put a lot more focus on customer usability tests,” Staudinger says. “We’ve developed a methodology that allows us to test what our customers like.”

As part of that testing, Eddie Bauer keeps close tabs on which products are selling online and which are not. Hot sellers may be promoted to a better page position while slow sellers may be incorporated into special promotions and sales.

Eddie Bauer also puts a lot of attention on its visual presentation. “There is a lot you can offer customers online, but you can’t offer them the ability to touch and feel the merchandise,” Staudinger says. “So you have to make up for that by heightening what customers get from their other senses.”

And visitors to the site notice that. “Eddie Bauer really knows how to romance the product and it gives you the same look and feel you would expect at one of its stores,” says Lauren Freedman, president of consultants The e-tailing Group.

Eddie Bauer has been improving its internal search capabilities so that shoppers get a list of products that match the query and additional information as well. “We’ve incorporated rich content into our search results,” Staudinger says. “We think customers want more.”

Junonia.com has found success in carving out a niche within a niche—active wear for plus-sized women. The 10-year-old web and catalog retailer will have $10 million-plus in annual sales this year.

But Junonia’s success goes beyond defining a super niche. Just as important is the one-to-one relationship founder and president Anne Kelly cultivates with shoppers. Callers to Junonia’s general number hear a recorded greeting from Kelly while they wait to be connected to a customer-service representative.

Shoppers also are encouraged to contact Kelly via e-mail with comments, suggestions and success stories. “Anne Kelly is a strong presence on the site,” says Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president, Retail Forward. “For a plus-sized customer to see someone on the front page that is clearly one of them, clearly listening to them, creates a lot of loyalty.”

That contact with customers often dictates which styles Junonia carries. For example, Junonia stocks the longer shirts many of its customers prefer even though short tops are the latest trend, Kelly says. To further meet customer demands, Junonia started a private-label line manufactured to its specifications.

Customer comments also led to changes in the technical side of web site. Junonia recently introduced a tool that allows customers to search for clothes by size. “That was on our customers’ wish lists for a long time,” Kelly says.

In addition, Junonia has strengthened the site’s search function to enable customers to search for items by activity, for example, golfing, as well as by product category. And it will be posting a browseable online catalog this month, Kelly says.

“A lot of people have asked us for catalogs who haven’t yet purchased from us,” she says. “These are names we think we can reach very cost effectively by sending an e-mail inviting them to click to our new catalog.”

The catalog, which will be produced by Paper Catalogs Online, is an exact replica of Junonia’s print catalog, according to Kelly. It will feature zoom capabilities and will be connected to the site’s shopping cart.

With 3,500 products and multiple SKUs of each online, quickly finding what they want from a retailer—and having fun while doing it—might seem unlikely for shoppers. But LandsEnd.com has made an art of serving up precisely that experience, one reason it is one of only two e-retailers recognized in all seven of Internet Retailer’s Best of the Web.

Top 500 Guide

Beyond the consistently strong value proposition of the merchandise itself and industry-leading customer service offered via call center chat and phone, LandsEnd.com continues to excel in how it exposes its offering to shoppers online. “A lot of retailers lose out because the are not doing a good job of making what they have visible on the site to customers,” says Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president, Retail Forward Inc. “The sites that have a better shot at conversions are those that give customers a good starting point. Lands’ End has historically been very good at evolving those shopping tools.”

Those include features such as the Virtual Model that lets shoppers visualize garments’ fitted appearance. Another example is the seasonal outwear headquarters, updated and reintroduced this year with a find-and-compare feature that helps shoppers choose cold-weather gear by allowing them to compare product attributes such as wind resistance and water repellence.

Director of e-commerce Bert Kolz notes that the site delivers the outerwear guide without using flash technology. “A portion of shoppers on the Internet are still on slower connections, so we’ve gone out of our way to create a tool that everyone can use,” he says. “It’s functional, it’s practical, it’s allowing you to shop in different ways for what you are looking for. That’s really what Lands’ End is all about.”

Kolz also notes that while LandsEnd.com has been characterized by innovation including its shopping tools, the site doesn’t require customers to use them to shop: They can find and buy an item quickly without further exploration if they so choose. “We don’t make customers use tools unless it absolutely helps in the shopping process,” he says. “Our core competencies at Lands’ End are innovation and customer service. And our web site continues to focus on ways to make shopping easier.”

When Macys.com was chosen as a Top 50 online retailer last year, a big part of the site’s selection was based on its broad range of merchandise. Who would have guessed that a year later, the site would have increased that already large selection by 50% from 105,000 items to nearly 150,000?

It’s all part of Macy’s desire to offer the broadest selection to the widest cross-section of customers. “While a lot of our focus has been in expanding our apparel and related accessories that constitute the core of our department store business, much of our growth has come from outside those core businesses,” says Kent Anderson, CEO of Macys.com. “We’ve added a lot to our home décor in terms of area rugs, candle holders, pillows and window treatments.”

In addition to expanding its products, Macy’s continues to make site improvements. One notable change is to inform the shopper earlier about the expected shipment times. Rather than at checkout, customers now can find out from the product description when the product is likely to arrive and where it is coming from. In the case of apparel, the information is available right after shoppers have chosen the size and color. Now if a customer is looking for an outfit for a special occasion, she will know right away if the item will arrive in time.

The broad product range and emphasis on assisting the customer is part of Macys.com’s efforts to reinforce its department store image. “The depth of product and features like gift with purchase and the bridal registry are all about connecting the Macy’s brand to its web site,” says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group Inc. “This is a company with a strong brand reputation and its web site reflects that.”

Beyond shopping, Macys.com offers a lot of services and even fun. Customers can type in a ZIP code and get not just the address of the nearest store, but that store’s hours and special offerings and events. The Wear & How section hosts videos of fashion advice for men from Donald Trump, P.Diddy, the CEO of Calvin Klein and the fashion director of Esquire magazine. Customers can click to view all of Macy’s TV commercials. And there is a special teen site with programming directed at young women.

It was an earlier store brand that coined the phrase, “Give the lady what she wants,” but these days, few multi-channel retailers have a web strategy that does that better than Talbots. The retailer of classic women’s apparel has maintained consistent merchandising, pricing and promotions across its stores and catalogs, tightly integrating those operations. The web site, launched in 1999, extends that approach to one more channel.

Talbots puts virtually the entire season’s catalog inventory online, a strategic decision that senior vice president of direct marketing and customer service Bruce Prescott says provides “a distinct advantage.” Phones in Talbots stores connect shoppers to Talbots’ call center, extending any store’s inventory to Talbots’ entire inventory. “The web is an extension of that,” says Prescott.

Talbots supports its comprehensive online offering with site search that’s up to the task, recently upgrading functionality to get shoppers to what they are looking for faster and incorporating new options such as sorting by bestseller status, price and other attributes.

With about 14% of Talbots’ $1.8 billion in revenue coming from direct sales and web sales 40% of that—up from 34% last year—the Internet remains the smallest share of Talbots’ sales. But Talbots doesn’t view the contribution of its web site solely in terms of online sales, leveraging it for marketing, merchandising and customer service across channels.

Exemplifying that approach and new this year is Style Search, which allows shoppers to reserve items they see on Talbots.com at a local store and be contacted by a store associate regarding availability. It saves customers time by allowing them to determine if an item is available before visiting a store and customers have repaid the favor by buying more. “A very high percentage of customers purchase additional items when they come in,” Prescott says.

Lauren Freedman, president of retail consultants The e-Tailing Group, gives the site high marks for strong product pages that feature enhancements such as item availability and merchandising such as a What’s New feature displaying the latest additions to the assortment. The Style Search feature Freedman terms “Amazing. I’ve tested it, and I got a call back within an hour,” she says. “The ability to drive online customers into the store is very powerful.”

Customization is the name of the game at Timberland.com. And nowhere is that more obvious than at the Design Your Own Boots section.

Because Timberland has always been a big seller of boots, customized boots quickly have become the site’s biggest seller. And it doesn’t just give the shopper a few choices and call it customization. “We offer seven basic styles to begin with. Then we have 16 attributes with 10 to 15 choices for each attribute. Our customers can come up with options that create tens of millions of different boots,” says Troy Brown, senior director of e-commerce.

Even seemingly simple things like the boot laces can offer a range of choices in color and style of the laces as well as style and type of hardware in the eyes. Customers who decide they want their initials on their boots have a number of choices in type of embroidery that is used and font and color of the letters.

And to keep customers from getting overwhelmed by so many choices, Timberland allows them to pick one of seven styles and then just tweak any features they want changed. The more adventurous shoppers can design completely from scratch. “We’re going like gangbusters with this offering,” Brown says.

“If I were a serious boot buyer, I would love this site,” says Tony LaTona, analyst with Consumer Consulting LLC. “They have a lot of content for serious boot buyers. But you don’t have to leaf through it all in order to transact. This site is much better than its competitors in terms of shop-ability.”

And the customization goes beyond product content. “Each web site page is no longer static. We’re getting smarter about what each customer is interested in. What we present to them can be customized to suit their interests,” Brown says.

Timberland employs this same innovation in marketing. Shoppers who click on a Timberland banner ad for the customized boot actually begin the process of designing their boots while they are still in the banner ad at another web site. “This captures their imagination. Then they can click to our web site and finish the process,” Brown explains.

When Tommy.com re-launched as a full—service e-commerce site in September, it did so with a splash. Rather than simply being an online catalog of high-end Tommy Hilfiger apparel, accessories and home products, the site also became a primer on “Tommy Style.”

Videos of fashion shows previewing Tommy’s spring 2006 collection, photos of the fall 2005 line, newsletters and other features all come together to create an environment that reflects the hip nature of the brand. It also allows consumers to view a wider selection of Tommy Hilfiger products than found in department stores, the primary distributors of Tommy products.

“We wanted the web site to be a place where people could go to really understand the full breadth of products we have,” says Jared Blank, senior director of e-commerce marketing. “We’re building out the world of Tommy online.”

Tommy.com uses familiar categories to which store and catalog shoppers are already accustomed, says Manivone Phommahaxay, consultant for user experience at Molecular Inc. “Users are not overwhelmed by the number of categories but they’re still exposed to the breadth of products,” she says. In addition, category landing pages are well thought out, she says. “They give users an interactive way to combine items to create a unique and personalized style,” she says.

Tommy.com also uses the latest online-shopping technology, including zoom and panning that give consumers close-up looks at items. The re-launched site even allows shoppers to customize the fit and style of men’s and women’s chinos and jeans. Shoppers can select fabric, color, style and other elements down to the color of thread on the buttonholes. Each step and style option has a detailed color photograph showing the exact selection. “The clickable color options make it easy for users to see product options,” Phommahaxay says.

Tommy.com also has developed special content for juniors and children. Teenagers, for example, can browse through animated e-cards showing the latest Tommy Hilfiger styles while the Norwegian musical group Ralph Myerz and The Jack Herren Band plays in the background. “We built a mini-site for the junior line because we felt to reach the teenage girl market, the presentation should have music and be more fun than the regular catalog,” Blank says.