Shirts and suits retailers using tech to stay smart

Men’s tailoring in the UK took off in London in the early 1800s, with personalisation, customisation, and in-store visualisation and selection of materials all central to the service customers received on Savile Row and surrounding areas of the city.

Those same pillars hold up the industry today, but with a digital twist woven in. 

Representatives from three UK formalwear retailers, Charles Tyrwhitt, Moss Bros and The Savile Row Company, mapped out their recent challenges and plans for the 12 months ahead, at Fashion Connect, an event hosted by e-tail trade association IMRG.

Each of those companies are going through the process of modernising formalwear retailing while maintaining the fabric on which the sector is built. This is involving taking what has been so successful about stores and in-person customer communication, and making it fit for websites – and vice versa.

Talking about the “old-school”, arguably halcyon view of suit making, where the tailor recognised the customer by name, knew what they last bought, and understood their size and preferences, Matt Henton, head of e-commerce at Moss Bros, says: “We try to replicate that across our digital channels.

“You have to have a good e-commerce platform [Moss Bros uses Remarkable], and we’ve got some suppliers who sit on top of that, who allow us to understand what our customers are doing, adapt the site, and respond and personalise the experience to each individual user,” he says.

Recently, Moss Bros has been using Dynamic Yield, a personalisation tech company, to help present its online customers with relevant suits and clothing. The tool allows the retailer to test changes made to its checkout process, and automatically offer product recommendations based on historic customer transactions – two moves that Henton says have helped boost conversions.

Kevin Cooper, director of e-commerce at Charles Tyrwhitt, revealed his business is considering sending those who work in digital on traditional selling courses, presumably because it will help give them more information about fundamental sales triggers and techniques. “The online team are really the bridge between product and customer,” he says.

“They can learn a lot from retail and we have them doing monthly visits to retail stores when they do visual merchandising work to understand how the retail team are selling to customers in store and seeing how we can transpose that online.”

For The Savile Row Company, which has transformed itself from manufacturer of goods for third-parties on the high street to become a brand in its own right that predominantly sells online but also operates a premium store at the heart of Savile Row, personalised online communication is a key focus area for the 12 months ahead.

Lee-Anne Harris, marketing director for the brand, says: “We currently have [e-commerce personalisation platform] Nosto set up on various different pages. Once the website is bedded in, we’re looking at other ways to personalise on the homepage, basket page, [and] product page.”

Harris, who is the granddaughter of the company’s founder, Gerry Doltis, daughter of the current managing director, Jeffrey Doltis, and, in her own words, her father’s “retirement plan”, said online personalisation on Savilerowco.com currently consists of price range-tailored additional item suggestions on product pages.

Explaining the site has just been re-platformed from Magento 1 to Magento 2, she noted there is now a chance to add new functionality.

“There are a lot of opportunities out there in terms of personalisation that are waiting to be explored once the new site is bedded in,” she says. “On the product page I’ve been talking to a solution where they are able to recommend complimentary products as opposed to ‘here’s something you may like’.”