💔 The Breakup Files: Why NA-KD and Pierre Cardin switched to Insider

The State of Fashion 2024 report, published by the Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company, reveals that successfully navigating this climate of uncertainty will require adopting winning strategies—including keeping costs in check, adapting to new consumer preferences faster than the competition, forging emotional connections with consumers, and prioritizing long-term brand building.  

These are ambitious efforts, and marketing teams will need the right technology solutions in place to make it all possible. 

If your current martech stack can’t rise to the challenge? Well, then it’s time to ditch that #ToxicTech and make the switch to a provider that really gets—and meets—your needs. That’s something fashion brands NA-KD and Pierre Cardin are all too familiar with…

It’s not me—it’s you

Like many organizations across industries, NA-KD and Pierre Cardin kept encountering roadblocks with their marketing strategies. They wanted to do more than they could with the tools they had at hand. Fortunately, they realized there wasn’t something wrong with them. The problem was with their tech stacks. 

For NA-KD, the issue was scalability. As one of Europe’s top 20 fastest growing brands, the company was accelerating with agility—but their martech? Not so much. The team quickly recognized that the collection of single-point solutions and in-house systems they were relying on were holding them back by keeping their data locked away in silos.

For Pierre Cardin, the challenge was driving cost savings. “Advertisement-based customer acquisition and interaction is becoming more and more expensive as we speak,” says the brand’s Digital Marketing and Social Media Manager. “We have seen a staggering increase in the fashion industry when it comes to the cost of acquiring customers, which ultimately reduces our return on ad spend.”

Time to break up?

NA-KD knew it needed to ditch its old toolset to live up to its full potential: To be able to create truly meaningful experiences for—and lasting relationships with—its customers by gaining a unified customer view.

“NA-KD has been growing so fast and our tech stack was not able to keep up. We were using different solutions and our data was kept in different silos. We wanted a partner that could power all the channels that we use and can also provide a 360 customer view that can provide a better customer experience.” — Head of CRM of NA-KD

With the price tag associated with converting new audiences on the rise, and the potential to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS) becoming increasingly difficult, Pierre Cardin saw that it was time for a change. The team allocates a significant portion of their paid media budget towards attracting new customers, and they knew they needed a new solution that would help them reduce their cost per acquisition (CAC). 

Delivering experiences as unique as each customer

When NA-KD discovered Insider, it found a trusted partner it could rely on for all of its channels—from email and SMS to web push and app push and on-site personalization. Instead of launching one-size-fits-all, calendar-based campaigns, the team is now able to create fluid and adaptive messaging with Insider’s journey orchestration platform, Architect, that is “as unique as our customers and brand,” says the company’s Head of CRM. Architect supports outreach across 12+ channels so marketers can seamlessly create endless 1:1 customer experiences. 

“With Insider, we gained a 360 view of the customer,” she adds. “We can identify previously unknown customers and track their behavior and personalize accordingly.”

These new capabilities have helped the company convert more customers, generate more revenue, and better engage with customers over time, driving retention, customer lifetime value, and ROI.

“We have seen exceptional results. Since we launched with Insider, customer lifetime value increased by 25% and the partnership exceeded our expectations. Last year we observed 72X ROI and we’re so happy.” — Head of CRM at NA-KD

Bye, #ToxicTech. The best years of NA-KD’s blossoming martech relationship are yet to come. Up next: The brand plans to lean into Insider’s predictive capabilities, specifically our AI-powered product recommendations to grow its customer base, average order value, and transactions. With our smart recommendations, brands can remove friction in the product discovery journey, reducing abandonment and driving engagement.  

Using predictive segments to reduce CAC

As Pierre Cardin searched for ways to become more efficient at reaching and converting new brand loyalists, the team stumbled upon Insider’s Predictive Ad Audiences (PAA), our artificial intelligence for advertising is designed to take the guesswork out of targeting across paid media channels, including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, remarketing, and more. 

It must have been fate. 

Pierre Cardin quickly saw the huge potential of this solution in enabling the company to segment its user base and tailor its advertising according to customers’ specific behaviors and lifecycle statuses, such as by likelihood to purchase, discount affinity, etc.

By being able to create customer segments based on real-time, historical, and predicted data and target customers who are most likely to make a purchase, the brand was able to deliver a combination of wins, including driving an amazing uplift in conversions of about 445% and a 165% increase in ROAS as well as successfully reducing its CAC.

“At Pierre Cardin, we focus heavily on providing the best possible apparel, merchandise, and retail experiences to our customers. When we approached Insider to guide our advertising program, they introduced their Predictive Ad Audiences platform to our advertising arsenal. With their expertise in the advertisement and marketing space, we saw fantastic improvements in our ad performance. The plan was to use Insider’s AI-backed technology to increase our ROAS. They smashed that target and also brought down our cost per acquisition by 67.95%. This was a huge (and very welcome) surprise!” — Digital Marketing and Social Media Manager at Pierre Cardin

Let’s make it official 💘

Thanks to Insider’s advanced personalization, journey management, and segmentation capabilities, fashion leaders NA-KD and Pierre Cardin have been able to see their KPIs and customer relationships soar.  

And it’s not just NA-KD and Pierre Cardin who have found their happily ever after with Insider—1,200 brands use our platform to build seamless, omnichannel customer experiences at scale—including Gap, Adidas, Puma, and Marks & Spencer.

“Insider enabled us to build relevant and timely campaigns across nearly 30 different customer segments. We built personalized, multi-channel user experiences and combined this with on-site gamification, which helped us gain a 700% increase in customer acquisition and 49X ROI within just two months thanks to Insider.” — Ecommerce Director at Slazenger. Read the case study. 

“We love working with Insider primarily for their customer journey orchestration capabilities. We’ve removed a lot of guesswork and manual intervention when delivering individualized journeys to customers at different stages of their life cycle. The results are remarkable.” — eCommerce Manager at United Colors of Benetton. Read the case study.

The future of fashion ecommerce

In their annual report on the state of the fashion industry, the Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company predict that executives must be prepared for a “strategically complex year” by being ready for a range of potential outcomes. The most successful brands will be those that manage to become resilient and act with agility, adapting as needed, as NA-KD and Pierre Cardin have.

If your current martech can’t help you keep up and evolve, it’s time to break up with that #ToxicTech and switch to Insider.

Keep reading

You can find out more about how Insider supports fashion brands like yours by downloading The Ultimate Digital Growth Guide for fashion marketers. We share tips, tactics, and real-life examples from the world’s most trusted apparel brands on how to drive more growth and revenue.