You joined Adore Me six years ago. What drew you to the company?

I joined Adore Me specifically to take over customer care. The company was going through hypergrowth and needed a way to scale everything from customer retention to engagement to marketing. In order to increase brand loyalty, I made it my mission to infuse a customer-centric focus into the work already occurring within the organisation. This has allowed us to retain more customers and build a first-class purchase experience, leading to deeper brand integrity as we serve our customers.

Who are your customers?

Adore Me brings online shopping to an incredibly diverse audience. The majority fall between the ages of 25 and 45, and are proportionally representative among big cities and small towns across the United States. We’re proud that our leadership in fashion e-commerce can have a truly equitable reach.

What has Adore Me done to remain successful in today’s online, on-demand world?

Since day one, it’s been about the quality of our products. A leading indicator of success is the return rate, and ours has remained low. We’re acutely aware of how important quality is for our customers, and will literally reimburse any return if it’s not a match. They need to be able to confidently purchase the same size across products and know that it will be a perfect fit.

Another example is the consumer payment experience. We ensure that the customer is comfortable purchasing by not overloading a transaction with too many options. Finding that balance between optionality with minimal friction has been important for our checkout experience.

What do you think is the next big step for e-commerce?

Live shopping is transforming how brands connect with the customer. This is particularly important as it relates to privacy – having a guide on a livestream can lessen the influence of ad tracking on marketing channels like social media. Live shopping has enabled Adore Me to better understand our customers and help them to discover new products.

Fast, free shipping has become the norm, but we also need to strike a balance between speed, quality, and sustainability. If we want to be more sustainable, fast shipping is not the optimal solution. We want our customers to be aware of different options and the tradeoffs of all of them.

Could you tell us more about Adore Me Tech, which launched at the end of 2021?

We launched Adore Me Tech as a way to bring together engineers, designers, data scientists, and product leaders to make it easier to launch new features on the Adore Me Operating Platform. Adore Me Tech is made up of 100+ people in Romania and New York doing amazing work to catalyse retail innovation and accelerate positive industry change.

This team is building on top of the Adore Me Operating Platform with helpful tools that support inventory management, product ordering, shipping, and much more. Their work is helping Adore Me expand into more markets, build fresh products, and launch new business models.

How is Adore Me leveraging technology to inform and improve the customer journey?

In order to be a technology-driven fashion brand, it starts with understanding data and how it is integrated into our technology. When a customer places an order, they need to see when that order will arrive plus details about the return process. We’ve built a complex system to communicate and track the customer journey to ensure they receive products on time and are charged for products they keep.

In addition, Google Analytics data is interesting to follow. It helps determine why a person is shopping and allows Adore Me to adapt our marketing to deliver what is most relevant when they return to the website. These are just a few examples of using technology to find creative ways to tailor customer experiences at each stage of the buying journey.

How have Stripe products helped?

We work with Stripe to streamline payments, but honestly, we don’t really talk about it that much – which is a good sign as it means the partnership allows us to focus on bigger-ticket items at Adore Me. Stripe helps us monitor for fraud and maximise authorisation rates so our teams can focus on the big picture.

Stripe helps us pull and manage an amazing amount of revenue data as well – everything from marketing to customers. With our membership-based model, customers can ship items to try on at home, return what doesn’t work, and only get charged for what they keep. This data becomes crucial, as we want to charge our customers the right amount at the right time. Stripe’s diligence and integration have been critical to our success.