Kurt Geiger: walking their way into the digital era

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Founded in 1963 Kurt Geiger are a leading luxury British footwear and accessory brand putting creativity and kindness at their core. The company has over 70 stores, and more than 170 concessions within department stores, including Harrods and Selfridges and has a strong online presence at KurtGeiger.com. Over the past five years, Kurt Geiger has been on the road to digital transformation; allowing the company to get the right products to the right places, at the right time, price and volume. This enables them to respond quickly to changes in the market and customer demand, ultimately driving more sales.

Operating in such a saturated and dynamic market requires the highest level of forward-thinking and internal operational efficiency to stand out among the competition. Digital transformation is the key to success in these markets and in a recent study McKinsey found that “fewer than one-third of organizational transformations succeed at improving a company’s performance and sustaining those gains, the latest results find that the success rate of digital transformations is even lower.” Therefore, IBM Business Partner Sempre had a huge task on their hands in helping Kurt Geiger to revolutionise the way the team work so they can perform tenaciously in the market.

The team at Kurt Geiger used to spend half their Sunday processing data and compiling trading reports ready for the management team on Monday morning. This lack of efficiency and use of resources has had a huge impact on the team, highlighting the need for this modernisation and digital shift. Despite having used IBM Planning Analytics and previously worked with support companies, Kurt Geiger was seeking a new and fresh approach to the next chapter of their digital transformation. Sempre quickly gained a deep understanding of how a business like Kurt Geiger needed to be supported helped them find opportunities they hadn’t seen before.

Sempre’s brief was to bring together all of Kurt Geiger’s systems and data to stop different teams from having to enter the same information saving them time and resources and ultimately increasing their companywide operational efficiency. With Sempre’s valuable support the company has gone digital-first which has enabled the team to adapt to the ever-changing nature of the economy. The work Sempre has done with Kurt Geiger has given them financial resiliency by taking costs away allowing them to continue to thrive in this volatile economy.

By adopting this new digital approach to working, Kurt Geiger have saved 30 trees per year due to the reduction of paperwork. Not only is this key to becoming more environmentally conscious, which is vital to businesses in the 21^st century, but it is critical to the modern world of working since the operational efficiency of going paperless is perpetual. For example, Kurt Geiger’s merchandising team has been able to improve the product and order creation process and they have been able to access analytics on future spending by product type which they previously didn’t have at their disposal.

Automation and reductions in load times in weekly trading reports has saved hours of manual work, opening opportunities for innovation and creativity within the business which can only help them achieve success in the market. Sempre has allowed the business to not only speed up their work making them more efficient but also increase the level of accuracy and insights into brand-specific information that Kurt Geiger previously didn’t have.

The work Sempre has done has been pivotal in this digital transformation since it has allowed the business to focus on merchandising strategy and consumers rather than spending hours collating information and data. This is crucial for a business who want to keep up with its ever-changing customer base.

Clearly Sempre have made a huge success of this digital transformation and Kurt Geiger have reaped the benefits already and will continue to in the future. If you want to find out more about Sempre’s work with IBM technology take a look at their site here showcasing their portfolio of stories.

Sources:

The keys to a successful digital transformation | McKinsey