Like many retailers, Reformation’s stores have racks of clothing, sometimes sorted by color and other times by occasion. There are various mirrors, a comfortable shoe sit-down area, and a friendly, informative staff. However, unlike any other retailer, there are different interactive digital displays where customers can build their dressing room and a team that can talk about the clothing, where it comes from, and what it’s made of. In each dressing room is a “magic wardrobe” that holds each customer’s selection of items. Customers can adjust the lighting, plug in their phones, play music, and request new sizes or items through an iPad.
What makes the Reformation store experience unique isn’t just the existence of technology but the way the company uses the data it collects from it. And that’s one of the main reasons for today’s unprecedented store experience.
This past month, the company relocated and re-opened its NYC flagship at 62 Green Street in SoHo. The new location was designed in consultation with Festen Architecture, giving it a more upscale feel, with a mix of modern and vintage elements, a larger footprint, 12 dressing rooms, and various upgrades to its famed technology.
Unique Technology and Data Collection
“Our Valencia store [in San Francisco] opened in 2017 and was our first Retail X store. The reason behind it was that if you walked into our SoHo store, for example, it was a fun experience; it was super vibrant, but we had so much traffic that our team often was fitting all their time just trying to check people out and find you the right size. And then, we noticed as we became bigger in e-commerce that you have so much data on the website – you can look at where someone’s clicking, what’s converting, where’s the best place to enter a new page – just an incredible amount of data. And in our typical retail store, you don’t know when they walk in if they convert. The data is much lighter, so we had this ‘aha’ moment of how data can improve the customer experience,” Hali Borenstein, Reformation’s CEO, shared.
The company knows how many customers prefer using an iPad versus asking an associate for help, the average number of items people try on and add to their room, and that the conversion rate is close to 60% once a customer is in a dressing room. These are statistics that any other retailer most likely couldn’t share.
The only experience similar is in Amazon’s latest Amazon Style stores, which are almost the same dressing room experience but much later to the game – the first store opened in 2022.
Transparent And Educational Customer Service
Reformation started as a physical vintage clothing store in Los Angeles. So, sustainability was always at its core. As the company grew, it began manufacturing its clothing sustainably, innovating its process and materials. Many companies will boast their sustainability efforts, like Patagonia or Everlane. But few will have an entire staff educated to share the details. “We launched a brand-new sustainability fabric, and we go deep into the conversation around why this fiber is so much better, and you hear these conversations happening in-store that are just not typical for a retail experience,” stated Borenstein. One of the brand’s most significant investments last year was in enhancing the communication between corporate and store teams to ensure the associates could thoroughly discuss the sustainable features of each product.
In the new NYC store, the company has also focused intensively on enhancing its clienteling experience, which will ultimately incorporate a lot of sustainability education and build longer-term client relationships.
Data-Driven Store Expansion
Retail is about 30% of Reformation’s business, but, like many other direct-to-consumer brands today, it’s also seeing the effect of stores on its e-commerce sales. “We’re very focused on meeting new customers in new markets using retail. So, you’ll see us not only launching second and third stores in big markets but entering new markets using retail because it really does help us grow our market. We see about a 50% to 80% lift in the market when we open our new stores,” Borenstein shared.
Away is another example of a brand that recently shared the effect of its stores, stating that it sees a 150% lift when a store opens in a new market. And there have been numerous studies performed on the subject, including one in 2018 that cited an impact of 23% to 33%.
Beyond the web impact, Reformation can use the data it collects in other locations and online to help inform merchandising in new stores. The data, the effect on different channels, and the general ability to educate are all driving factors to their expansion plan of about ten stores a year for the foreseeable future. It has also begun expanding into Asia with a recent partnership with South Korea’s Shinsegae department stores in Seoul and Busan. And in addition to its new NYC flagship in SoHo, the brand recently opened a new store in Scottsdale, Arizona, and has plans to open another DC location in Bethesda this summer.
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