Keeping Composed: How Harry Rosen Modernized its Luxury In-Store and Online Strategy
A closer look at the digital transformation that moved Canada’s leading menswear retailer into the future of omnichannel commerce, improving experiences for customers and employees alike.
In the competitive world of luxury retail, staying ahead of consumer expectations requires more than just an elegant storefront. For Harry Rosen, a leader in the luxury menswear market, this meant overhauling its digital strategy to create a more personalized, seamless, and innovative shopping experience. This transformation is a testament to how integrating best-of-breed technologies can redefine customer engagement and operational efficiency.
On September 25, 2024, Orium, Algolia, commercetools, Talon.One, and Dynamic Yield by Mastercard came together at one of Harry Rosen’s stores in downtown Toronto to showcase how all of these composable solutions support the modern Harry Rosen omnichannel strategy.
The Challenge: Meeting Evolving Customer Expectations
After more than 65 years bringing quality menswear brands to Canadian shoppers, Harry Rosen faced the challenge of modernizing its in-store and online presence to meet the evolving expectations of its clientele. For a brand that was founded on deep 1:1 relationships and personalized service, the goal was to create a trustworthy and cohesive shopping experience that mirrored the luxury and personal touch of its physical stores while embracing the latest in omnichannel technology.
To do that, the tech stack has to support the brand’s vision.
“Harry Rosen built this business on relationships, and one relationship at a time. How do you deliver that relationship-based experience in a digital context and how can you extend a relationship from offline to online and back again? …Clients expect personalization.”
–Jessica Gale, Chief Customer Officer at Harry Rosen
Strategic Technology Integration: How Harry Rosen did it
Orium: Setting the roadmap for success
In 2018, Harry Rosen partnered with Orium to set that vision and bring a next generation digital experience to their clientele. To do this, Orium embarked on a broad engagement with Harry Rosen to connect clients, employees, and systems management in one comprehensive platform. With Orium’s Composable Accelerator, Harry Rosen was able to launch their replatform off of their monolithic commerce architecture to a digitally-enabled experience within 5 months. Working together, Orium and Harry Rosen created the roadmap for long-term success, building the foundations for and implementing the technology layers that make up its composable and cross-channel commerce stack today.
Harry Rosen embraced composable commerce in order to build a flexible and scalable ecommerce platform. This approach allowed the retailer to integrate various best-of-breed solutions for each capability into one unified system. By leveraging composable solutions, Harry Rosen could rapidly adapt to new market trends and customer preferences without overhauling the entire system. This agility was crucial in responding to dynamic customer needs and maintaining a competitive edge in the luxury market.
“In luxury, we want the best of the best. That has fueled a lot of our technology choices: how do we bring together the best-of-breed partners that we want? Harry Rosen has been on a MACH-based architecture journey to bring these solutions to life… Picking leading edge technologies has been really critical.”
–Jessica Gale, Chief Customer Officer at Harry Rosen
commercetools: A Platform Worthy of Luxury
Harry Rosen then joined forces with commercetools to kickstart that composable commerce transformation. As opposed to website-in-a-box alternatives, this partnership allowed the retailer to create an ecosystem of best-of-breed vendors and different technology layers to deploy microservices and bring Harry Rosen’s expertise in styling and the relationships between clients and advisors online.
commercetools enabled Harry Rosen to implement new commerce features, including digitized style consultations to allow advisors to recreate in-person appointments and curate personalized product web pages for clients, shoppable photos on the Harry Rosen website, and cross-channel consistency across digital and in-store systems to centralize discounts, inventory, loyalty, and more.
This shift to composable also came along with a 3x growth in online business with zero downtime.
Algolia: Enhancing Search and Discovery
The next critical component of Harry Rosen’s digital overhaul was improving its search and discovery functionalities. Partnering with Algolia, a leader in AI search and discovery APIs, Harry Rosen implemented a powerful search engine that significantly enhanced the user experience on their ecommerce platform. Algolia’s real-time search and discovery allow customers to find not only what they are looking for quickly and accurately, but also items effectively similar to what they are looking for. These capabilities facilitate a more intuitive shopping journey and offer flexibility to meet unique use cases.
The advanced features, including autocomplete and typo-tolerance, help users easily navigate and filter through the store’s extensive inventory, making search and product discovery seamless and efficient – resulting in a 360% increase in conversion rate, 68% increase in transactions, and 18% increase in average order volume for Harry Rosen.
Talon.One: Modernizing the Loyalty Program
Understanding the importance of customer loyalty, Harry Rosen then modernized its loyalty program using Talon.One, resulting in the revamped and personalized CLUB HARRY program. Talon.One helped the retailer create and manage highly personalized, omnichannel loyalty campaigns. Through the platform, Harry Rosen can deliver tailored offers, rewards, and promotions based on customer behavior and preferences. This level of personalization helps strengthen customer relationships and drive repeat business, aligning perfectly with the high-touch service expected in luxury retail.
Since the launch of the revamped CLUB HARRY program, Harry Rosen has re-engaged 43% of previously active clients who had not made a purchase in the 12 months prior.
Dynamic Yield by Mastercard: Enhancing Personalization
To optimize and scale personalization, Harry Rosen incorporated Dynamic Yield by Mastercard’s solution into its strategy. Dynamic Yield by Mastercard’s technology enabled the retailer to deliver hyper-personalized content and product recommendations based on user affinity and customer preferences. This sophisticated approach ensures that customers receive relevant and engaging experiences online. By leveraging Dynamic Yield by Mastercard’s capabilities, Harry Rosen can offer a tailored shopping journey that reflects the quality and curation of its brand.
Leveraging Dynamic Yield to segment audiences and tailor messaging led to a 17% increase in purchases for high-intent users and a 40% boost for low-intent users.
Bringing it All Together with a Customized Web App
To bring these layers together and incorporate them into a unified in-store and online experience, Harry Rosen built the Herringbone app with Orium – allowing in-store associates to create a more sophisticated and seamless customer experience directly from their cellular device, and helping drive a 15% increase of associate sales year-over-year.
“There is so much potential in this app to grow our business… In the Spring/Summer season this year, we sent over 15,000 laydowns to our clients and I believe it attributed to 10-15% of our online sales. Hopefully this time next year, we can double that.”
– Miles Brady, Virtual Sales Leader at Harry Rosen
The custom app offers:
Efficient inventory browsing
Herringbone offers a more efficient tool for browsing inventory compared to the website or POS, offers imagery, similar items, and shows on-order items and out of stock items for an inventory-aware customer experience.
Advanced filtering options
Extensive filtering options allow customers to see only items on sale, certain sizes, availability, store inventory, and online inventory.
Custom client laydowns
Harry Rosen advisors can create specific looks, dubbed “laydowns”, to represent the tradition of laying down outfits together when with clients based on their preferred brands, upcoming promotions, available sizes, and more. Advisors can then share a link to those laydowns via email or text, and clients can make purchases directly through that link – attributing the sale to that advisor.
Client tier view
The app is able to filter clients by tiers, last contact dates, active redeemable loyalty points balances, active carts, and wishlists – allowing client outreach to be as targeted as possible.
CLUB HARRY offers
View clients’ loyalty status, available loyalty points balances, and CLUB HARRY offers unique to each client in the app.
Order tracking
The app can track recent orders and visits to provide tracking numbers and order information to clients.
Upcoming updates
Soon, Harry Rosen advisors will be able to receive notifications allowing them to see active tasks with their clients, such as outstanding sales, item pickups, alteration statuses, and transfers from other stores.
“[The Herringbone app] is a really important piece of our infrastructure here at Harry Rosen. My team specifically, who work remotely and don’t have the ability to come in-store, we’ve built relationships with clients strictly using this app. Some of my team’s strongest clients we’ve never even met in person.”
– Miles Brady, Virtual Sales Leader at Harry Rosen
The Results: Seamless and Sophisticated Customer Experiences
For Harry Rosen, the integration of these MACH Alliance technologies resulted in a 3x year over year Black Friday sales rate, zero holiday down time, 2.5x improvement in digital sales year over year, and a 120+% holiday conversion rate.
The enhanced Algolia search functionality improved product discovery, while the composable commercetools framework provided the flexibility to adapt and innovate. The modernization of the loyalty program with Talon.One deepened customer engagement, and Dynamic Yield by Mastercard’s personalization capabilities ensured that each interaction was relevant and personalized.
Harry Rosen’s commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology to enhance its omnichannel strategy demonstrates how traditional retailers can successfully navigate the complexities of the modern digital landscape. By focusing on personalization, flexibility, and advanced functionality, Harry Rosen exceeds the expectations of its discerning clientele, reinforcing its position as a leader in the luxury retail sector.
As retail continues to evolve, the success of Harry Rosen’s composable transformation serves as a case study for other brands looking to enhance their customer experience and improve operational efficiency through the right supporting technologies within its modern retail solution.