Digging Deeper with Data
Love, Bonito is a Singaporean fashion retailer that offers women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories. Founded in 2010, the brand has since expanded internationally across Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Hong Kong with plans to expand into the United States. Love, Bonito is the largest vertically integrated, omni-channel women’s fashion brand in the region today.
For businesses, figuring out how to use collected data is a common challenge when it comes to digitalisation. For Love, Bonito, the company gathers customer data from both online and offline channels. In 2019 the brand created their in-house data team, ensuring the data was easily accessible and established metrics to track it. In 2020, they developed analytics frameworks like customer segmentation and launched their loyalty program. Now their key focus of the data is to delight their customers through personalization throughout their omni-channel experience.
Jane Leong, VP of Data and Growth at Love, Bonito stated that the challenge of data is not technical implementation but defining the strategy, action plan and afterwards coordinating the workflow within the company.
Before Love, Bonito built their data infrastructure, it was important to first identify the key business questions that matter and define key performance indicators(KPIs) to track. Afterwards they understood that in order to scale the company, they needed to improve their analytics capabilities as all of their data was scattered across separate systems. They then redesigned their analytics workflow by building their own enterprise data warehouse, compiling all their business data in one place and allowing for more comprehensive and efficient analysis. Through this process, Love, Bonito gained clarity on how to optimise their data warehouse, prioritise what data to track and ensure data quality is maintained.
Love, Bonito primarily focuses on two main areas – gaining a deeper understanding of their customers to provide better service, and increasing efficiency and automation throughout their business to work smarter, faster, and better.
In order to offer relevant products and delightful experiences to customers, Love, Bonito uses behavioural data collected from their platforms to decide what products to offer, when to release them, and how to optimise stock levels at each store preventing wastage. The data also includes insights on how customers interact with their website and their shopping habits. The company then works with designers to use Artificial Intelligence(AI) to accurately predict winning designs with the data collected. Through this process, Love, Bonito can customise their products and services that customers can enjoy. From data strategy the brand used, it led to an 8% increase in its second purchase rate among customers.
“The beauty of data is that it has a compounding effect. As our models and analytics capabilities become stronger, we can create more meaningful and tailored experiences for our customers which in turn gives us more data to strengthen our models and analytics. So we keep getting better and better.”
Love, Bonito’s Advice for Other Retailers
Obsession with customers makes Love, Bonito at the top of their game. They use technology to better understand their customers and engage with them. Relying on data alone is not enough to make decisions. The brand combines data and customer engagement which produce additional insights to create smarter decisions. This in turn leads to better customer experiences and products.
“Data is knitted into every part of our business, from understanding customer preferences and changing trends, to driving efficiency in our inventory decisions and identifying new opportunities for our business.”
Building a habit of leveraging data takes time. Having clean, consistent and accessible data is an important step that Love, Bonito’s new data infrastructure has created. Although data is a long-term investment, Love, Bonito made great progress in its digitalisation through data.
“In the long run, we turn customer insights into actionable plans that drive the design process.”
