Leather goods maker Coach has launched a new application to streamline reporting and digitize the business from behind the scenes.

The retailer teamed with business intelligence solutions provider MicroStrategy to build the app for internal use. As retail becomes more digitized, Coach decided to explore options to become hands-on with data and offer quicker solutions to better its business.

“The benefit of having MicroStrategy as an overall integrated platform is having one integrated metadata,” said Danielle Schmelkin, vice president of business intelligence and customer engagement solutions at Coach, New York. “I can’t even express properly what that means in terms of the complexity that we can reduce.”

Flexibility
MicroStrategy’s platform provides visibility as far downward as the store level, enabling retail teams the ability to examine sales trends for any given geography. Coach can do this via the platform solution in a more efficient and intuitive way.

With this technological insight, Coach can more efficiently make decisions based on the data provided by MicroStrategy to serve its customers.

Also through the platform, the Coach team has consolidated a set of reports into one dashboard, allowing individual business units to track their sales performance and stay ahead of customer preferences that may change.

The brand is able to view the effectiveness of events held across different locations and times of the year to see what works best.

Coach executives are already seeing different ways the platform can be of use.

“Recently, someone in a meeting asked about the performance of a new store and, in the meeting, I was able to pull up that store in a dashboard that no one had seen before, where we had put a couple of graphs with some trend lines,” Ms. Schmelkin said. “It is starting to generate the buzz that we knew it would.”

Coach, founded in 1941, was established long before the high usage of mobile, but to stay relevant to its user base, the brand should experiment with various mobile implementations to better appeal to its audience.

Connecting the abroad
This year, Coach has made several moves that show its desire to connect with its most dedicated fans.

In June, Coach partnered with retail brand Poloraid Fotobar to promote an Instameet in New York, where professional and amateur photographers could share their Coach New York stories.

Coach selected top Instagram photographers to participate in the making of a collaborative image story and printed the photos taken through Polaroid Fotobar’s mobile print shop. Coach encouraged its followers to contribute and be a part of the story making (see story).

“Coach is a culture where we want to be able to answer any question when we are asked,” Ms. Schmelkin said. “If we are more aware of what our brand is doing as a business, we can propose much more thoughtful solutions, which ultimately will have more value for our business.” 

Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York