How Aldo puts its best foot forward with a unified e-commerce system

With its signature brands ALDO, Call It Spring, and GLOBO, ALDO Group Inc. lets consumers express their true selves through quality footwear, handbags, and accessories. Founded in 1972, the company now has more than 1,500 stores in over 100 countries. The brand offers shoppers style, variety, and comfort at the right price, which is what’s made it a beloved brand worldwide.

ALDO Group’s founding vision was to create a different kind of fashion company built around respect, integrity, and a deep understanding of the customer. A connected e-commerce ecosystem underpinned by SAP solutions enables insights and experiences that are helping bring this vision to life.

Staying relevant in a complex and fast-moving retail environment while increasing profitability has always been tough, particularly in challenging economic times. Customers want more and want to be seen for their individual tastes and preferences. ALDO faced the headwinds of needing to integrate data from in-store and online purchasing and browsing, while delivering excellent customer service and maintaining the fair prices their customers have come to expect.

ALDO Group envisioned an integrated commerce experience in which e-commerce, in-store point-of-sale (POS), and ordering solutions were one. They needed to integrate e-commerce and digital offerings, reduce customer returns. It needed to upgrade its systems to connect shoppers with the right products based on availability, location, segmentation, and preferences.

With customers all over the world and online, integrating browsing and purchase history was a first order of business for the ALDO Group. Connecting data about behavior and preferences meant a more holistic view of the customer, allowing for AI insights to improve product recommendations and customer experience, as well as allowing for better inventory management. This updated set of technology solutions has the company on track to meet their commitment to reaching net-zero emissions while maintaining growth and robust profitability.

Connecting data and systems to provide the experience shoppers expect

The first step for ALDO was to integrate data about customer behavior and preferences into one cohesive system. To that end, the team deployed the SAP Emarsys and SAP Commerce Cloud, as well as SAP Customer Activity Repository application as the foundation of its new core customer experience solution. SAP Customer Activity Repository enabled real-time inventory visibility. SAP Emarsys gave a 360-degree view of customer purchase history and demand across channels, demand forecasting to help optimize shopper experiences, and customer insights to personalize marketing.

Collectively, these offerings helped the ALDO Group smoothly connect digital transactions, inventory management, and customer engagement. In addition, as Gregoire Baret, Vice President of Digital Product and Experience at the ALDO Group Inc. explains, a cloud-based approach offered the team “more scalability, more security, and more horsepower when we need to boost our system performance.”

Another advantage of implementing these solutions in concert was their composable approach. This enabled flexibility and smooth integration with the company’s broader technology landscape to support current and future growth. The ALDO Group combined the feature-rich core capabilities of SAP Emarsys and other solutions at its own pace, achieving speedy results.

Reacting nimbly to changing needs

The improved connectivity, scalability, and modularity of ALDO’s core e-commerce landscape enabled them to offer shoppers the services they want, when they want them. By combining SAP Emarsys and SAP Commerce Cloud, the ALDO Group was able to engage customers across channels and drive conversion efficiently to achieve profitability and growth.

Accurate data is key to the consumer experience, and quality and accessibility of data have also improved thanks to ALDO Group’s implementation of SAP Emarsys. Thanks to this data integration, the ALDO Group can now better combine product, inventory, customer engagement, and transactional information. This helps the team not only offer great service, but gives them a robust dataset to pull from when utilizing SAP Emarsys’ AI engine.  The company now uses AI to make product recommendations based on customer browsing and purchasing behavior. The technology will help the ALDO Group improve demand forecasting, inventory management, and resource allocation. 

These integrations help the ALDO Group personalize pages with relevant social content and offer a smooth checkout, which is, in Baret’s words, “a key moment where you need to build trust.” The connected ecosystem also means the company can better manage sales during peak periods such as the holiday season.

SAP Emarsys has helped the company act quickly to keep up with consumer expectations. Baret elaborates, “We have a ‘headless’ approach, which means the front and back ends are decoupled. So, we can be very targeted in the way we act and focus on specific components in a very independent and flexible manner. This is critical for us because we have tons of different applications. We need them to work together as one unified and living system.” SAP Emarsys’ easy integration into the ALDO Group’s Martech stack allowed for seamless improvement in processes without too heavy a lift from IT and marketing.

Reaching net-zero emissions targets aided by a core customer experience

A key priority for the ALDO Group is its commitment to reaching net-zero emissions. SAP solutions will play an important role in promoting ALDO Group’s sustainability goals through e-commerce and digitization initiatives ranging from site-performance optimization to demand forecasting.

Baret says, “It’s been 10 years since we’ve been on our journey for sustainability, and we have reduced emissions related to direct operations by more than 70%… We already have carbon-neutral shipping and can do more in optimizing inventory allocation and logistics as well as properly managing hardware to avoid replacing it by fixing or refurbishing it instead. We believe this is critical for us to be able to reach our goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.”

By utilizing SAP Emarsys to learn more about their customers and create an omnichannel strategy across marketing channels, the ALDO Group has created a path to further growth and success and a long-term plan to achieve its goals. As Gregoire Baret, Vice President of Digital Product and Experience at the company says, 

“Customers want more, better, everywhere. It’s a permanent race to keep up and grow our bond with them. We’re trying to bring service excellence to them and make sure we meet their expectations, whether that’s about payment options, shipping options, or social media connections. It’s about getting it better, faster, at a fair price with full transparency for consumers. And it’s about making this work everywhere on all channels.”

ALDO Group’s partnership with SAP Emarsys and its use of SAP tools such as SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Activity Repository has elevated the ways in which they serve and delight their customers. This is helping create further loyalty and improve business outcomes for the brand.