Canadian Retailer - Spring 2014 - 20

OMNICHANNEL RETAIL

SHOPGIRLS' SECRETS TO E-COMMERCE SUCCESS

For Michelle Germain, the message-no matter the channel-is
the key to giving her customers a
seamless shopping experience.
"Our message is very simple,"
explains the owner of Shopgirls,
a six-year-old boutique clothing
store in Toronto's Parkdale neighborhood. "We encourage women
to shop their shape not their size.
Shopping can be really unpleasant
and intimidating for women after a
certain age...we recognize that.
"We try to highlight our client's
best assets, giving them a pleasant
experience that stays with them."
The six shapes Shopgirls brand
and market to their customers
are: an hourglass, circle, inverted
triangle, rectangle, classic, and
triangle. Germain and her welltrained staff of four adhere to this
philosophy to create this experience in-store. And, thanks to the
help of experts, this same message awaits her customers online
at www.shopgirls.ca.
This Shop Your Shape message is everywhere. "If you go to
our website, a lot of people don't
realize we are a retailer right
away, but I think the message is
the umbrella," Germain explains.
"Go to our homepage and you

can try on six different shapes.
Once you discover which one you
are, you can browse our online
shop, which will only show you
items that match that shape. Once
our customers are educated on
their shape, they can easily ﬁnd
speciﬁc items that work for their
body; it also reduces the amount
of returns."
At ﬁrst, the idea of launching an online shop intimidated
Germain; she stressed about the
time and money needed to launch
an e-commerce site, but the
entrepreneur also understood its
importance. "You have to have a
presence, you have to be relevant,
and you have to stand out from
the crowd...there is a lot of noise
out there."
In the last few months alone,
several similar boutiques in Germain's neighborhood strip have
closed; she believes it's partly because they didn't have an online
presence. Two years ago Germain
switched to Canadian supplier
Shopify as her e-commerce solution, a game-changer for growing
her online business and integrating it with her storefront.
"We switched to Shopify right
around the time we started to take

strategies. Retailers can access more of a
marketing toolkit than ever before; there
are so many more ways to engage with
that customer than the traditional advertising route. In his book Ctrl, Alt, Delete, Joel
talks about what he says is going to be "the
next great business disrupter": utilitarianism marketing.
"It's about creating something that really
resonates with people and adds value to
their lives," he says.
Simply screaming at your customers is not
the solution. There's already too much noise
in their lives. True omnichannel creates a
more profound direct relationship with your
customers. The added challenge is that even
with one sale, several parties can own this
relationship. For example, you buy a pair of
Beats by Dre headphones at Target and then

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canadian retailer | spring 2014 | www.retailcouncil.org/cdnretailer

the online shop more seriously to
gradually build and create more
of an in-shop atmosphere on our
website that was welcoming, easy
and friendly," she says. "Switching to
Shopify was a great move."
To further engage customers,
Germain uses various social
media tools such as Facebook,
Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram;
she also sends out a monthly
e-newsletter that currently has
5,000 subscribers. Come spring,
she plans to switch this communiqué to a bi-weekly format because
within the ﬁrst 30 to 60 minutes
of sending out this e-newsletter,
she always gets immediate sales.
"You can't run a successful
business today without all of those
channels," she concludes. "There
are so many choices out there; you
have to be in your customers' peripheral at all times and the only way
to do that economically is to have
constant, consistent messaging. It
is a lot of work, and it is expensive,
but I would not be here today if I
hadn't adopted that approach as
well as making the in-store experience as portable as possible. You
can't do one without the other."
For more information: www.
shopgirls.ca, Twitter @ShopgirlsG.

like the brand on Facebook. Each of these
brands have an interest in you. "The retailer
is now fighting with every single brand in
their own store," says Joel. "Everyone is trying to get that direct relationship."
No matter who owns that relationship or
who drives the omnichannel ship in your
organization, there is still no definitive
answer as to what is the perfect seamless
solution other than making every business
decision with the customer in mind.
"Everybody has a right to be wrong when
you talk about omnichannel these days,"
Danahy concludes. "No one knows what
omnichannel will look like at any given point
in time until someone else comes along and
revolutionizes it. The concept of having multiple channels is not new; the concept of
who is in charge is what's new."
http://www.shopgirls.ca http://www.shopgirls.ca http://www.retailcouncil.org/cdnretailer
Canadian Retailer - Spring 2014

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