“Yotpo is a fundamental part of our recommended tech stack.”
Laura Doonin, Commercial DirectorIn 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.”
Switching to Yotpo has transformed the user experience for Steve Madden shoppers. In addition to collecting 57% more reviews, the company has seen “tremendous growth” in the amount of shoppers actually interacting with reviews and other UGC on site, prompting a major increase in conversion.
In addition, mobile, which drives 48% of traffic to eCommerce sites (and 60% for the fashion industry) is now another major channel for Steve Madden. With Yotpo, the company was able to optimize influential reviews and UGC to be seamlessly displayed on mobile, spiking conversions.
With more reviews than ever before, as well as powerful customer photos and a robust new loyalty & referrals program, Steve Madden suddenly found themselves with a wealth of data about who their customers were and what they wanted. Using Yotpo’s AI-powered Insights dashboard, which aggregates the topics customers mention in reviews as well as the sentiment, Steve Madden was able to put this data to work. The company can now tailor its product development, customer service, and marketing campaigns to fit the specific needs that customers express.
The improvements have been so dramatic on Steve Madden’s US domain that reviews have now been syndicated to Steve Madden domains around the world, and rolled out to sister companies Betsey Johnson and Dolce Vita, with more to come.
Glossy highlights Steve Madden’s loyalty program success in a September 2019 article: “Madden used to offer customers a 15% one-time discount when they signed up for its email list for the first time. Now, it gives them a 20% off one-time coupon when they sign up for the loyalty program, because it’s more likely that the customer that signs up for the loyalty program will continue to buy from Steve Madden over time.”
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“Yotpo is a fundamental part of our recommended tech stack.”
Laura Doonin, Commercial Director