At Klaviyo’s annual London event, K:LDN, which brings together brand leaders to discuss marketing trends and technologies powering business growth, we caught a fashion-focused session exploring how apparel retailers are optimising engagement.

Steve Rowland, President at Klaviyo, was joined by Paul Smith, Jacquemus and Bee Inspired and discussed how fashion retailers are anticipating customer needs across touchpoints and using data to hone shopper experiences.

Shapeshifting shopper styles and evolving channel mix redefine retail strategies

Despite Paul Smith being known primarily for tailoring, consumers’ attitudes to what they wear and how is changing – and this is evolving the fashion retailer’s customer engagement strategy. Hannah Bennett, Paul Smith’s Head of Digital, explained: “consumers don’t wear formal suits like they used to, so how can we speak to our customers about how they buy and wear clothing differently?”

Bennett said it is promoting different wearing occasions to drive engagement as well as using storytelling with its namesake founder, Paul Smith, about the new era of tailoring within its campaigns. It also communicates outfitting suggestions, such as pairing a blazer with more informal chinos or a polo rather than a formal shirt, to inspire shoppers.

“We’re really thinking about how to outfit an item and story-tell around building out that wardrobe for our customers,” she said.

For Ryo Senga, CRM and Clientelling Project Manager at luxury fashion label Jacquemus, one of the biggest consumer shifts had been driven, not by changing shopper tastes, but by their fast evolving channel mix.

Senga said that initially Jacquemus had been ecommerce-first, and when shoppers were coming on-site they were browsing more entry-level items. Since opening a raft of stores, including London and New York in October 2024 and its most recent in LA just a few weeks ago, shoppers now opt for more expensive ready-to-wear and higher-end products.

Moving beyond one-dimensional discounting

At premium streetwear brand, Bee Inspired, its Head of Marketing, Will Wilkie, said that one of the most pronounced changes it had seen within its customer behaviours was in shoppers’ discounting expectations.

“Everyone knows now that no-one buys anything online without a discount,” he said. “But now, everyone wants the discount and everyone wants personalisation as well. So, it is about how can you marry those two together and make it relevant for that customer.”

To address this, it is interrogating its data and using Klaviyo to understand the first customer touch-point within shoppers’ buying journeys – what the products are and why they clicked. It then uses first-click data as a starting point for building out personalisation to make discounts more targeted to individual shoppers.

It is also moving outside of blanket 10% discounts and thinking about customer benefits, such as offering international customers free shipping, so discounting provides more value.

Personalisation for growth

When it comes to scaling personalisation for growth, segmentation and RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value) were the key focuses for Bee Inspired.

“Knowing your cohorts, knowing exactly who you’re going for, why you’re going for them – whether they’re customer champions or ‘at risk’ shoppers – you then know where the triggers are to pull down on for the comms,” Wilkie explained. “There’s no point telling someone about a new collection if they’ve never actually bought a single item in the first place.”

While Paul Smith does deploy some segmentation, this is more at a cohort level, according to Bennett. It will focus on optimising and scaling segmentation over the next six month to a year – at the moment, it’s more about finding the right tools: “AI is in every product we have now, but how can we find the right tools that fit our teams so that they can get the most out of it and get the results to scale it,” she commented.

Bennett highlighted that it has just undergone a significant digital transformation project, having re-platformed from Magento 2 to Centra, which has allowed Paul Smith to adopt a headless, composable tech stack. It ensures the systems it puts together are API-first to allow it to plug and play more effectively.

Connecting the store to grow omnichannel performance

Jacquemus has recently integrated its ecommerce and bricks-and-mortar data to give it a single view of the customer. In-store, its clientelling teams can now see purchase history and other preference data for an individual shopper to help enhance personalisation and drive CX. It is also using Booksy, an appointment scheduling solution, to bring digital customers in-store that is pushed out via Klaviyo.

Recreating physical experiences which translate what Bennett described as the “golden thread of the Paul Smith brand” into digital experiences is a key focus for Paul Smith. AOV in its stores is x3 higher than online, so the challenge is recreating that experience digitally. Paul Smith has just launched its alterations service nationwide as well as offering repairs online, and is working to building transactional data into its CRM to join the dots across customer behaviours.

However, while omnichannel is a focus Paul Smith’s customers tend to pick a channel and stay in that lane. “We see quite low cross-over of customers that shop off and online,” said Bennett. While it doesn’t have an overt loyalty programme yet, that will change this year, with Bennett hinting that this may include gamification and community building when it’s ready to launch.