The Context

When a fashion company wanted to engage consumer input to guide its designers’ work in the children and youth categories, it looked to Strop Insights to leverage consumer insights to define its customer, retail, and new product strategy. Before designing clothing styles for future seasons, this fashion company sought clear direction on strategy – craving consumer input to shape their design, marketing, and retailer strategies. Identifying specific attributes (i.e. versatility, comfort), wear occasions (i.e. birthday parties, church), and retailers was valuable, particularly among its unique, differentiated customer segments which comprise the client’s core business.

The Strop Solution

Collecting data from children and their mothers, Strop Insights used clustering algorithms to segment customers into groups seeking similar styles and demonstrating similar shopping behaviors, need-states, and retailer preferences. Clusters were based on both “softer” attributes (such as favorite celebrities or preferred playdates with friends), as well as “harder” attributes (such as annual dollars spent on dresses or retailer shopping behaviors).

Our Impact

Using insights generated from Strop Insights’ study, the fashion company was able to (a) hone its essential customer segments (while de-emphasizing segments with less opportunity), and (b) recalibrate the design team towards those fashions more relevant to each customer segment and target retailer. Highlighting the most notable opportunities for each segment across need-states and shopping behaviors provided focus and clarity to an otherwise challenging and dynamic category.