How AG Jeans transformed their brand experience

SUMMARY
Tulip's Store Experience Platform is helping the premium
denim brand to connect with customers and grow store
sales. Read all the details in this case study.

About

AG Jeans

The AG Jeans Story

AG Jeans is a premium denim and knitwear house
leading the sustainable manufacturing movement.
The California-based brand opened the first vertically
operated denim manufacturer on the West Coast and
has built a loyal following around craftsmanship and
eco-minded processes.

Today, AG Jeans serves 20 countries around the
globe and has stores in fashion capitals like New York
City and Los Angeles. Beyond their products, the AG
Jeans shopping experience stands out because it’s
so personal. "Oftentimes, you’ll see our clients visiting
different locations when they’re traveling in other cities.
They’re truly brand loyalists," said James Bishop, AG
Jeans Director of Retail.

If you were to ask our clients

what makes AG Jeans
special, they would tell you
it’s a combination of quality
in both product and service.

James Bishop
AG Jeans Director of Retail

QUICK FACTS

Founded in 2000 in Los Angeles,
California by Adriano Goldschmied

Known for environmentally-conscious
design and manufacturing

Worn by Taylor Swift, Kate Middleton,
and Tom Brady

Manual Clienteling makes it hard to scale

1. makes it hard to scale

Store associates, called Stylists at AG Jeans,
play a massive role in shaping the store
experience. They used physical notebooks
to keep track of VIPs and personal devices
to conduct outreach and follow ups. The
practices made customer interactions and
experiences very personal but required
superhuman effort to execute.

2. practices made customer interactions and

Because of the individual efforts, processes
were not uniform across the brand and
were difficult to measure and manage. This
hindered a seamless brand experience at an
international level and raised concerns about
how to scale as AG Jeans grew. It also made
it challenging to forecast productivity or
influence sales in an omnichannel way.

“20 years ago, when we first opened the
doors, we had the luxury of being able to
wait and see who was coming into our store.
Today, as I’m sure every brand knows, that’s
no longer the case," said Bishop.

AG Jeans wanted a solution to:

01.

Simplify

Structure and simplify clienteling
for scale and consistency

02.

Empower

Empower stylists to proactively
and predictably make sales across
channels

channels were not uniform across the brand and

03.

Analyze

Give leadership accurate and
necessary data to drive the
business strategically

We know that the relationships we have with our customers are
a major sales driver, so it’s important that we’re proactive and
systematic about how we create them and how we track them.

James Bishop
AG Jeans Director of Retail

How Tulip transformed

AG Jeans’ business

Tulip put mobile devices into stylist’s hands and
equipped them to systematically engage with
customers and grow their sales. As a result, AG
Jeans saw a massive change in their business
within the first six months of using Tulip.

“Tulip has transformed our business at every
level. Our stylists have the bandwidth to
be engaging with clients in unprecedented
numbers, and our leadership teams are able
to focus on coaching, strategizing, and driving
the business.”

Tulip has transformed our clienteling
process from a manual system to an
automatic one, which has just completely
changed the game.

James Bishop
AG Jeans Director of Retail

01. Simplify

Tulip enabled AG Jeans to digitize their client
books and systematically conduct outreach

Tulip helped AG Jeans to structure and simplify their
clienteling practices by giving stylists a repeatable way
to keep track of customer information and manage
customer follow ups and outreach.

“With Tulip, we’ve seen a drastic increase in the number
of customer outreaches that our stylists are able to
complete, and we’ve seen amazing conversions from
those communications as well,” said Bishop.

Instead of relying on their own personal notes, Tulip
offers a centralized digital client book with 360-degree
customer profiles where stylists can see everything from
what the customer purchased online last year, to which
colors they like best, to last week’s SMS message. Tulip
then uses this profile's information to make suggestions
for customer outreach and follow ups so that stylists
always know exactly where to focus their efforts.

Results from the first 6 months using Tulip’s Store Experience Platform

increase in
conversion on
outreach

The Solution

Tulip has given our stylists the ability
"to sell across channels and our
average order value has increased
by almost 20% as a result.

James Bishop
AG Jeans Director of Retail

02. Empower

Tulip empowered stylists to make sales across
channels in an efficient and attributable way

Instead of waiting for foot traffic to make sales, Tulip
opens up communication across channels and enables
stylists to communicate using the medium customers
prefer, including email, SMS, phone, and social
messaging tools.

Tulip ensures that outreach is scalable and efficient by
providing quick templates that can be customized for
brand-wide or store-level mass communications. Tulip
provides templates for quick SMS messages that can
be sent with just a single tap but still feel personal and
contextual. Email templates go a step further and give
stylists the ability to quickly send seasonal looks, event
invitations, and other personalized communications
without needing to build them from scratch.

Customers can click on a look and make a purchase
through the ecommerce site. Tulip will automatically
attribute the sale to the stylist who sent it so that they
see the impact of their work, without the customer ever
needing to step foot in the store. On the flip side, when
customers are in store, stylists can sell them the full
AG Jeans product line—even if the item is only carried
online or at another location–using Tulip’s digital
lookbook and endless aisle feature.

03. Analyze

Tulip provided on-demand visibility to the in-depth reports needed to strategically drive business

Tulip equipped AG Jeans leadership with the tools they
need to drive the business strategically by providing
complete visibility to accurate store data in
easy-to-understand reports.

Operational reporting used to require a herculean
effort from managers to review with mountains of
manual notes and client books, and outreach being
scattered across numerous personal devices. With
Tulip, store managers have in-depth insights available
at their fingertips. Tulip’s system automatically records
and organizes customer data and outreach metrics for
each associate so managers can see everything
at-a-glance, and be able to coach their teams on how
to drive performance.

Our vision for AG Jeans is to design
an elevated store experience that
truly differentiates us from other
denim brands. We want to provide
the level of luxury our clients expect.

James Bishop
AG Jeans Director of Retail

Similarly, outcome reporting used to only be reviewed
annually or semi-annually by executive teams who
were faced with sales numbers that weren’t always
accurate. Tulip automated outcome reporting which
provided executive leadership with visibility to real-
time sales and store performance data that allows

“When we talk about having insight to data, it’s not
enough to have those metrics at annual or even
quarterly reviews, it needs to be in real time,” said
Bishop. “Tulip’s reporting is great because it’s both
easy to access and easy to understand. If we want
data on what products are performing best in our
store on Madison Avenue, we can see that in seconds
rather than months. It’s made a huge difference to how
we strategize. The retail landscape is changing very
quickly. Customers are expecting different things than
they did 20 years ago, and sometimes it can be difficult
to keep up.

ABOUT TULIP

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Tulip is setting a new standard for
omnichannel retail by unlocking the power
of stores with a suite of cloud-based
solutions built for retail transformation.

Partnered with Apple and Salesforce,
Tulip equips sophisticated retailers to
build connections with customers, fulfill
orders, checkout purchases, and optimize
operations in order to create the end-to-
end experience modern customers expect.

Leading retailers like Mulberry, Saks Fifth
Avenue, Indigo, Kate Spade, Purolator,
and Michael Kors use Tulip to elevate the
shopping experience, increase sales, and
improve customer service across channels.

Ali Asaria
Founder and CEO