BOSTON – An executive from Le Tote at eTail East 2016 walked through how it leverages a data algorithm to make its rental recommendations and experience more personal on mobile and digital.

During the session, Creating Community to Drive Commerce, the executive explained that the fashion rental service drives innovation and personalization through an algorithm it calls Chloe. The solution predicts which products subscribers are likely to be interested in based on past history, likes, dislikes, sizing and more, and is also used to help fuel change and innovation for its mobile and digital services.

“Chloe is our algorithm,” said Lauren Miller, vice president of marketing at Le Tote. “She is what takes all of our customer data, all of our brand data, puts it all together and hopefully it is delightful.

“We are improving that experience every time,” she said “So your first tote is going to be different than your last tote.”

Personalization through technology
Le Tote members subscribe to the monthly service to rent fashion items. When users sign up, they are first asked a series of questions so that the AI solution, Chloe, can better predict items of interest.

However, there is a delicate balance the brand must walk to be sure the onboarding process is not too cumbersome. If new users have to answer too many questions, they may get frustrated and drop off.

The solution helps solve a wide range of problems, such as the differentiating sizes across brands. Often times a customer will be one size in one brand, but a completely different size in another, and the AI solution will automatically find the correct size.

Business evolution
Chloe also helps fuel decisions for business in general that better serve the customer, and can also relay information to brand partners to help with product development. Le Tote is always looking to onboard new customers and sees great success by leveraging user-generated content from social media.

Email has also been a big driver in onboarding new customers and engaging continual subscribers. Since the company has invested more in email, customers are sticking with the program longer and becoming brand ambassadors.

“So we have got all this information coming from you and 150 growing brand partners, we want to put that together in a really customized fashion,” Ms. Miller said.