Pepe Jeans India Ltd, the country’s premium denim brand, aims to build a customer-centric business, enhancing its direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategies through digital transformation.
Pepe Jeans India’s managing director and CEO, Manish Kapoor told iTnews Asia that the company has been focussing on digitally transforming every single aspect of its business.
“We see transformation as a whole journey from how we design, produce, forecast demand, market and then ultimately reach out to consumers,” he said.
Pepe Jeans London launched its brand in India in 1989.
It has become the most popular lifestyle brand in India with over 250 standalone stores, 700 department store counters, over 700 multi-brand counters, and a presence across leading eCommerce platforms. It relied largely on partners and intermediaries to reach consumers.
The brand began its transformation journey in three key areas starting with its customer-facing website.
With the majority of that business coming in through third-party portals and marketplaces, Pepe Jeans was not able to get consumer insights or interact with the consumer directly.
"So we focused on a consumer-facing website and added on its capabilities around managing and marketing by offering personalisation", Kapoor said.
“We plan to leverage technology wherever possible, to improve efficiencies and interactions with consumers," he added.
Partnerships and use cases
Pepe Jeans has partnered with several digital services providers and is working with around 40 different solutions across the business including Salesforce, Darwinbox, BlueKaktus, ClickPost and more.
It has "successfully" implemented a digital project to improve its value chain connecting over 56 odd suppliers across India, China, Bangladesh and Europe enabling it to get real-time information on production lines.
The firm has also migrated its entire human resource management platform onto the cloud to support employees through a digital app. It could now speed up several processes from simple reimbursements, and travel requests and even approve appraisals online, Kapur said.
Using Salesforce, Pepe Jeans can now deliver personalised customer experiences across all channels and achieve a unified customer view, Kapoor said.
The brand has witnessed significant outcomes in delivering personalised products through customer interaction on its website built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Apart from cloud migration, Pepe Jeans has also focussed on achieving visibility.
As the firm handled around 2000 orders on a daily basis, it struggled to keep track of the logistics processes. Post implementation of solutions from ClickPost, "we can now keep track of these orders throughout dispatch to delivery", Kapoor said.
Moreover, Pepe Jeans can now not only get qualitative inputs but also gain consumer behaviour insights through transactions on their website, he added.
“At Pepe Jeans, we were able to predict demands and change production/supply flows to service those requirements better,” Kapur said.
Future plans
Speaking on future plans, Kapoor said Pepe Jeans is currently working on building data lakes based on consumer personas both from online and offline interactions. He also said that the firm is planning to increase technology investments to deliver new solutions like virtual try-ons and online product customisations.
“We are looking forward to leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence for gaining more specific insights and automating manual processes,” he concluded.
