By inviting customers to weigh in on future products and applying proprietary predictive analytics to their feedback, the MakerSights product intelligence platform helps brand partners develop more accurate sales plans, de-risk new product introductions and measure how customers respond to product attributes like fabrics, colors and price – all within minutes.

"The shifting winds in retail are forcing brands to rethink how they operate. Customer expectations of immediacy are leading to dramatically condensed production schedules, and brands must satisfy an increasingly savvy customer who can buy any product from nearly any brand in the world with a click of a mouse. To succeed in this challenging environment, the most important asset that brands should be leveraging is their own customer, but existing methods of getting insights from customers are slow and expensive," said Dan Leahy, CEO at MakerSights.

MakerSights has analysed more than one million structured product evaluations from customers, which its machine-learning platform pairs with actual sales data to improve predictive accuracy with every tested product.

By minimising markdowns and doubling down on their biggest winners based on learnings from MakerSights, brands typically see a 2-4 per cent gross margin lift. MakerSights' predictive algorithms forecast future product sales with 90 per cent accuracy. About 98 per cent of customers who engage with MakerSights say they want to give feedback through the platform again in the future. Customers that brands engage using MakerSights go on to purchase at rates that are two times higher than control groups, said the company in a press release.

"At Ralph Lauren, we truly value the voice of our customer. MakerSights allows us to better understand how design details and product attributes resonate with our customers to help inform our product decision making. Our goal is to create products our customers love, and MakerSights helps us to do that with more confidence by engaging our customers directly," said Bryan Fogg, vice president, global customer intelligence & experience management at Ralph Lauren.

"Since our founding at MM.LaFleur we have always done things differently, from rethinking our product development process to how we sell clothes to professional women. Incorporating insights from MakerSights is another way we are approaching retail differently. By understanding customer preference even before we go into production, we can more confidently and quickly make difficult decisions on pricing and how deeply to go into a new product," said Sarah LaFleur, CEO, MM.LaFleur.

"Customer centricity and faster speed-to-market are two of Lucky Brand's most important strategies. MakerSights has been a critical component of driving these strategies forward. The 24-hour testing timeline enables our merchants to make quick data-informed decisions vs. the lengthier traditional in-store testing methodology. By enabling our business to implement data-driven product testing, we are also able to better understand our customers and invest in winning products. We look forward to continuing to partner with MakerSights and their nimble and hands-on approach," said Lucky Brand CEO, Carlos Alberini. (KD)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India