FatFace uses Salesforce to create a seamless shopping experience
FatFace uses Salesforce to boost online sales by 24%
FatFace is a British, family and lifestyle clothing brand that is made for life. With a unique heritage, FatFace creates product ranges across women’s, men’s, kids, footwear, and accessories for the whole family to live life in. Its products are designed with purpose and built to last. All with considered style, trusted quality, and sustainably sourced.
FatFace is a multichannel retailer with a thriving international digital business as well as over 180 stores in the UK, 24 stores in the US, and a highly engaged social community. The brand has sustainability at its core with a clear strategy around three key pillars – product, planet, and community. Devoted to style, dedicated to sustainability.
FatFace is dedicated to helping its customers have great experiences, and that starts when they visit a store, on the High Street or online, where both environments complement each other perfectly and present a seamless lifestyle brand that’s driving customer loyalty and commercial success.
We talked to Director of IT, Zona Smith and Chief Operating Officer, Mark Wright to find out how Salesforce is contributing to a business on the up and up.
Creating a ‘one team’ approach to ecommerce
The success of FatFace is built on enjoyment, so its people work hard to ensure that every single contact that customers have with the company is enjoyable. This essential attention to detail permeates the business from top to bottom.
In common with many successful organisations, the challenges of the global pandemic produced a leap forward in its online presence and ecommerce operation. As well as expertly showcasing the style and quality of its ranges, it has also focused on making important improvements to bread-and-butter issues that make a real difference, like delivery times and providing multiple sources of information for customers, such as a virtual assistant.
As stores re-opened, the company has capitalised on the decision of Chief Operating Officer Mark Wright to merge store and online operations into one entity, creating one team and empowering instore crew to help customers with online-related services too, such as order in store and click and collect.
The result of these synergies digital sales now exceeds 40% of total revenues and a Trustpilot rating of 4.6, with 80% of more than 25,000 reviews giving the company five stars. Wright is quick to acknowledge Salesforce’s role in the enduring success of FatFace.
“We have a very strong relationship with Salesforce. The platform is tried and trusted, it sits at the centre of our business and it’s robust and reliable, which is really important at a time of many challenges and uncertainties. The combination of Commerce Cloud and MuleSoft has given us stability and confidence. It’s so easy to integrate new features and functionality so that we can move very quickly when opportunities present themselves to enhance service and the customer experience.”
Combining complementary solutions delivers immediate results
FatFace’s Salesforce journey began with the realisation that the company had outgrown the many legacy systems that had served it well in the early stages of its development, and that it was unable to provide the quality customer experience that it aspired to deliver.
“FatFace is really good at designing and selling beautiful clothes and we want to retain that focus,” explained Director of IT, Zona Smith. “We were looking for a technology platform that was flexible and scalable, but equally we didn’t want to employ a large team of IT people, so selecting a strong and capable partner was important. That partner is Salesforce, alongside Astound, the service integrator.”
“Commerce Cloud gives us a really strong base to build on with lots of features and functionality available out of the box,” added Wright. “We liked the speed of implementation, it’s very easy to use, and it’s being constantly updated so it always feels evergreen. It enables us to take the user experience that we have already established, and were largely happy with, and build on it. So rather than a shocking, overnight change for customers, we could evolve and add new features in a controlled way over time.”
Crucially, FatFace also paired Commerce Cloud with MuleSoft. Commerce Cloud’s 360-degree view of customer data ensures a seamless, multichannel, personalised experience, irrespective of device and location. The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform securely connects all FatFace’s business critical systems, applications, and data on customers, pricing, and stock levels, creating unprecedented levels of visibility, control, and efficiency.
“The Commerce Cloud implementation was a dream,” recalled Smith. “It was rapid, and our Salesforce implementation partner, Astound, had a very well-honed and comprehensive methodology. After launching both Commerce Cloud and MuleSoft, we saw an immediate increase of 24% in conversation rates – performance amazing, stability amazing – no more sleepless nights!”
Enhancing trust and loyalty through personalised customer experiences
With the first major digital transformation programme – the Salesforce implementation – going so well, this gave the FatFace board the confidence to invest in further digitisation. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the company had a real advantage with the infrastructure and systems in place to pivot quickly, pushing all its transactions through the FatFace website.
“We weren’t scrambling, trying to adapt on the fly, we had the foundations in place, so the pandemic, while clearly a crisis, was also an opportunity for FatFace,” recalled Smith. “With everything integrated through Salesforce and everyone looking at the same data, we could make quick decisions and respond at pace with real confidence.”
Buoyed by the success of the Salesforce programme, the business forged ahead with further digital transformation programmes, including replacing its legacy ERP and EPOS systems. These are major undertakings, especially so during a pandemic, with lots of risk and lots of potential disruptions to the business.
“We relied heavily on MuleSoft during this time,” explained Smith. “The beauty of MuleSoft was that it enabled us to carve this huge programme into distinct phases, because we could keep old and new applications in line – inventory, product, prices – by building temporary integrations.”
As a result, FatFace took advantage of its stores being closed, and when they reopened, they did so with brand new tills, brand new Wi-Fi, and mobile tills. “MuleSoft sits right at the heart of our business now, orchestrating so many activities - inventory, product, deliveries, and store to store transfers,” added Smith.
“I’m proud that we’ve spent our money wisely and frugally. We’ve completely transformed our technology landscape without increasing the size of our team. The user experience online is slick across all devices which is so important and really brings the brand to life. We have relied on the expertise of our partners like Salesforce and the result is a huge culture change within our own IT team. The reliability we now enjoy from the Salesforce platform has allowed our people to really grow, they’re much more customer and commercially focused now, they have space to innovate, be enablers of change, and focus on what’s next.”
Providing business resilience and confidence in challenging economic conditions
Just as the post-pandemic business environment was returning to some form of near-normality, economic and geopolitical events are combining to create fresh uncertainty and upheaval, affecting societies worldwide. Energy and cost of living crises are combining with more and more extreme weather events.
When the duration and impacts of turbulence like this are difficult to predict, businesses like FatFace and experienced, proven leaders like Wright choose to rely on those things that they can control and trust, rather than events they can’t. It seems likely that achieving growth in the current circumstances will be challenging and many of FatFace’s loyal customers will have less disposable income to spend on clothing.
“We have a strong business with ambitious international plans and Salesforce provides the scalability to help us make that happen,” said Wright. “Our passion for digital has stood us in good stead, and for the first time the majority of our online sales are now via mobile, and we continue to provide a fantastic instore experience.
“One impact of the current uncertainties is that consumer shopping habits may change, they are likely to shop around and the peaks around landmarks like Christmas and Black Friday may be reduced. Thanks to Salesforce, we can provide a fantastic customer experience, seamlessly, online and instore, and so, I’m confident that we’re in a strong position to come through these challenges and still achieve our goals.
“Salesforce is a source of real stability, we have complete confidence in the platform, which is extremely valuable as we continue to accelerate our digital growth.”
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