In 1990, with just $1100 and a car trunk full of shoes, Steve Madden started what would become one of the footwear industry’s most important brands. The company quickly morphed into a multinational industry-disruptor, pioneering the concept of fast fashion.
Long recognized as a household name, Steve Madden has nonetheless continued to bolster their position in the market by becoming an enterprise portfolio company, acquiring brands like Superga, Brian Atwood, Dolce Vita, Betsey Johnson, and more.
As an ever-evolving company, Steve Madden began looking to younger, digitally native brands for inspiration. Despite being a retail-first company, Steve Madden saw how eCommerce could enable the brand to prioritize a direct relationship with customers, control the consumer experience, and achieve higher margins. This prompted a strategic D2C shift.
The technology Steve Madden was using to support their eCommerce channel was costly, rigid, and antiquated. Because the company was using three different tech solutions — Bazaarvoice for reviews, Olapic for visual marketing, and CrowdTwist for loyalty — the experience, both for Steve Madden and for consumers, was not cohesive.
Jeff Silverman, President of Steve Madden Global eCommerce, explains, “Our technology was so fragmented … We had multiple relationships, roadmaps, and data sets to manage across all our brands. The support we received from these solutions was also so limited that our results from these tools were weak.”
Steve Madden needed a tech partner who fell in line with its own core goals of speed, flexibility, and innovation.
First, Steve Madden switched to the agile and highly adaptable Shopify Plus platform. They then turned their attention to Yotpo. By converging three tech solutions — reviews, loyalty, and visual marketing — into one, Steve Madden could significantly reduce the complexity of their technology stack, while simultaneously creating a consistent shopping experience across international domains and Steve Madden brands.
Silverman was immediately impressed by their Yotpo CSM, Katie, who provided the personalized attention he had been lacking with previous tech partners: “Unlike most tech solutions, who solely tell you how to do it, Yotpo actually implements it for you.”
Even more impressive to Silverman was Yotpo’s efficiency: “Yotpo was able to beat our deadline and implement in under a month! This coincided with the replatforming to Shopify Plus and so we had all of our reviews and UGC showcased beautifully from day one. The process was flawless, with no downtime.”
