In Conversation With: Michaela Wessels from Style Arcade. Tom sits down with Style Arcade Co-Founder & CEO - Michaela Wessels to learn more about the platform and its benefits, the tension between innovative design and commercial viability, the recently released consultation programme for growing brands & much more.

In today’s world of ecommerce enablement, it's never been easier to build an online retail business. But, there's a problem. It's easy to launch, but hard to GROW! Why? 

To keep scaling, brands need to answer retail’s toughest question which is, How much to buy? As a Merchandise Director I was buried in a sea of data, multiple systems and only spreadsheets to rely on. This was true in every brand or retailer I worked in, even the largest ones. Doing my job well seemed impossible without good technology. What I needed was a single source of product data from which to make all my product decisions. Especially those critical buying and planning decisions about exactly how much to buy and in which sizes. I knew that if I could get this right it would unlock growth for the brands. 

Style Arcade was first launched into The Iconic and it became my secret weapon as well as creating an army of avid fans in the buying department with over 300 users at the Iconic alone. We now have over 120 brands and retailers, across 7 countries with 6,000+ global users which still blows my mind but it’s clear we delivered something quite unique to the market.

• Single source of truth on product performance.
• A visual and intuitive system that can be used by the whole team.
• AI and automation allows them to delete all the manual spreadsheets and get back to trading.

Style Arcade uses merchandise planning principles to flag product product performance and provide recommendations. It measures product velocity, predicts sellout week, suggests when to discount, when to re-order AND quantifies exactly how much to order in which sizes. Here are some use cases:

Marketing:

• Report on campaign performance 
• Know exactly which products to market to drive conversion & revenue 
• Track which products are delivering when and in what quantities 

Ecommerce: 

• Create high converting product feeds to be used across Google, Meta and Klaviyo
• Create site merchandise plans based on product performance metrics
• Automatically tag products in Shopify for fast creation of landing pages etc

Buying:

• Perfect their order and size quantities 
• Automate all of their reporting and product attribution
• Visualise their range by region, country channel and store

Style Arcade integrates with your returns platform to give you deep insights into return rates and return reasons by product, by size, by category, by supplier, price point, fabrication and more.

Understanding exactly which levers you can pull to organically lower your return rate without constraining your sales or profit is key. Speed to identifying returns problems and correcting them prevents a poor customer experience and builds loyalty and customer happiness.

It’s all about making your data work harder for you through key integrations, which is why we integrate with platforms like Loop and Refundid to ensure these return reasons and metrics are visible across all touchpoints in your collection. This makes post-season analysis a breeze, because when you’re able to add the visual element to returns data you can easily spot patterns in the range and take action in the next season.

Absolutely. Humans are visual creatures and process imagery 60,000x faster than text or numbers. Gone are the days of looking at SKU #, it doesn’t tell you anything. The retail customer also buys products based on the look of it first and foremost so if we’re unable to draw the link between data and the visual elements of the product then we’re not seeing our range from the customers eyes. The visual and intuitive nature of Style Arcade’s interface is the reason that it’s been able to create super fans within the buying, planning, marketing and ecommerce departments.

There is a saying in retail that “she comes for the hot pink but she stays for the black”. It's so true that most customers invest in the most commercial and core products within a brands range but they were drawn to the site with the aspirational products. It's for this exact reason that a perfect balance is needed between an assortments width (number of options) vs depth (units per option).

Using Style Arcade's Buy calculator will give you a recommended order quantity for ANY product or combination of products in your range. Fun feature: if you’re ranging a brand new product simply use Style Arcade’s Search Similar feature to see all similar products through all of your history and also provide an ideal recommended order quantity by size. Range planning allows you to visually and financially balance your range for width and depth in your “black” (core/commercial products) vs “hot pink” (aspirational/campaign products) styles.

Discounting masks poor performing products as good performers. In Style Arcade it's really easy to see if sales performance has been fuelled by discounting and which products would not have performed the way they did without the discount boosts. Knowing which products are actually driving full priced revenue allows you to invest in the right places to achieve a better and better profit outcome. Style Arcade will easily split your products into products that need discounts and those that don't, thus ensuring you never give away unnecessary profit.

We’re finding that one of the biggest challenges amongst brands is the disconnect between advertising and inventory. There is a considerable amount of ad spend being wasted simply because brands aren’t able to utilise their own product data to optimize feeds and are relying too heavily on in-platform algorithms in Google and Meta. With Style Arcade’s dynamic tagging functionality, brands are able to automate and ensure only HIGH CONVERSION product feeds across their shopping channels. Curating high converting product feeds involves filtering for only those products with: high velocity, high size availability, good profitability, low return rate, high reviews count, good reviews score and healthy stock levels to last through the conversion window. These products lead to higher conversions and far higher ROAS. 

Style Arcade has just released the Style Arcade for Ecommerce app. This gives growing brands access to the most loved parts of the platform, helping them level up, automate and grow. At Style Arcade we believe in democratising merchandise buying and planning smarts and making these available to brands of all sizes. Style Arcade also offers merchandise consulting to brands who want to power up and dig deep into their data to understand their growth levers. This is available to brands both large and small.

If you consider that fashion brands lose 23% in profit every month through bad buying decisions, then simply by buying right, sizing right and pricing right, brands have everything they need to take leaps towards growth and reaching their true sales potential. The biggest issue in overproduction is the excess ordering in sizes which is absolutely solved by technology. Use your data to your advantage.

• Style Arcade for Ecommerce - giving these smarts to every growing brand
• More integrations with everyone's favourite apps
• More AI
• What this space for a giant brand announcement coming