Gap
6 min
What our client needed
Launched over 50 years ago in San Francisco, Gap has built a brand on staying true to their roots, while always being out in front of what’s next. Gap's clothing is rich in heritage and crafted with care, with 100s of products produced with recycled materials or from 100% organically-grown cotton.
Gap store employees had expressed the need for a simple system to understand the latest visual merchandising direction in the context of their own stores. This would help them display new clothes and their marketing collateral on the shop floor as fast as possible for customers to purchase.
Gap’s central teams wanted to bring agility, collaboration and transparency to the communication of seasonal merchandising plans and store layouts for stores globally. Equally, they wanted feedback and insights into how different displays impacted sales to inform and improve future plans.
DCX agency, Reason, had already successfully delivered a number of initiatives for Gap - helping them surface valuable marketing activity KPI data to optimise future seasons and harmonise planning across the franchise, as well as putting store, district, region, and market sales, traffic, and stock data in the hands of every decision maker across the company.
Knowing that for Gap, as a global fashion and retail business, delivering consistent customer experiences efficiently created challenges for local teams and central management, the team set about working with Gap’s franchise business teams to deliver an interface for managing the in-store brand experience across over 3,000 stores worldwide.
What we gave them
Teaming up with store staff and the Gap global team, we designed a service that transformed visual merchandising from a paper-based system with little two-way interactivity to a responsive platform.
This new platform enabled dialogue between local on-the-ground teams and Gap's global creative directors, reducing roll-out times of seasonal visual merchandising plans from hours to minutes.
Using intuitive designs, we created an instinctive, easy-to-use app that required little training and could be used across all markets.
We created the mission-critical platform in partnership with Gap’s in-house digital product team, sharing knowledge to give Gap the technology, design, and delivery skills needed to support the app in use and transform their business.
What was the impact
The launch of Gap's ‘MyStore’, built to allow both quick iteration and scalability to support a global rollout, delivers real-time data back to the global team, and the consistency of visual merchandising has improved across all stores, all around the world.
Gap is now able to fully understand the effect of store design at local, regional, and national levels, which is helping to inform their strategic decision making.
We've been absolutely delighted with the results:
- MVP to market - 6 weeks, 5 stores
- Reduce process from 4 hours to 1 hour - 75% time saved
- Partner roll-out - 3 months, 100 stores for 5 franchise partners
- Full roll-out - 6 months, 400+ stores, in 40 countries
- Franchise and phased corporate roll-out - 12 months, 3000+ stores in 220+ countries
In early projects, we saw Reason's ability to cut through Gap's internal bureaucracy, to significantly accelerate our product launch process. Even in times of crisis, they act decisively and with a transparency that engenders trust.
Mark Stevens, Product Director, Gap