Intermix is the latest retailer to partner with NuOrder by Lightspeed to drive its digital business transformation and strengthen and accelerate the retailer’s hyper-localized strategy, both online and in-store.
The technology will enable Intermix, which has 31 boutiques and an e-commerce channel, to analyze their assortments across categories and regions, get products set up on their e-commerce site quicker and complete wholesale orders faster than ever before. Intermix will also use NuOrder by Lightspeed’s tagging capabilities to expand on exclusives and drive personalization.
Intermix plans to implement an accelerated roll-out with a full launch across all categories for the cruise 2023 buying season.
Further, Intermix will use the NuOrder by Lightspeed platform to make data-driven decisions to complete their orders. Using pre-populated data and imagery, Intermix can view their assortment across different attributes to create a unique experience for their customers regardless of where they’re shopping.
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“Intermix is known for curating the best fashion edit every season, by discovering the most sought-after styles from established and emerging designer and working with brands to develop items exclusively for Intermix,” said Divya Mathur, chief merchandising officer of Intermix. “Our partnership with Lightspeed will allow us to hyper-localize assortments at every one of our 31 boutiques nationwide and expand our e-commerce offering, while still maintaining our unique product point of view. We are excited to combine NuOrder by Lightspeed’s data capabilities with our expertise in spotting trends and editing assortments to accelerate our growth. As we continue to scale, we are looking at investments that will enable us to offer a highly personalized boutique shopping experience across both channels.”
Olivia Skuza, general manager, NuOrder by Lightspeed, and cofounder of NuOrder said, “We are excited to partner with Intermix. a boutique retailer known for delivering a highly curated and personalized shopping experience for its customers, both in stores and online. Lightspeed will provide Intermix with the digital tools needed to make data-driven decisions and create an even more exceptional, hyper-localized customer experience.”
Mathur believes NuOrder will help make both the online and in-store operation more efficient.
Previously, Intermix used home-grown Excel buying tools. “Our organization over the last two years has gone from a primarily a store-driven buying team to now robust channels of business. Both of our channels are large players. We’ve really been thinking about ways to accelerate our online growth and part of that is making investments in technology that will allow us to be more efficient, and be more curated in both channels, and to bring more data-driven buying decisions along with what we think we do really well which is curation and identifying trends, and knowing what it is our customer wants,” Mathur said.
She said that almost 94 percent of Intermix’s brands are on NuOrder, and others will be able to incorporate their data onto the platform. Even though NuOrder is a buying tool, she believes it will provide them with a lot of efficiencies across their entire organization. The way they collect and inject data into NuOrder will allow for much cleaner and standardized data across product IDs, attributes and tags, which will allow them to personalize and customize recommendations on the website, she explained.
Before, they were manually doing things and there were errors and subjectiveness. “Now we’ll make sure all our product tags are clean and standardized, and we can even layer on all product tags.” She said when they start investing in personalization on the website, it will feed on this data with rich product identification.
According to Mathur, she also sees an advantage when it comes to the actual edit and curation. “NuOrder will give me and our team visibility to every one of our 31 stores and what we’re putting in them at the time of making these decisions. Because we’re a collection of boutiques with hyper-localized assortments — we have stores in Aspen, Palm Beach, Southampton, Beverly Hills, Marin…we have varied real estate across the country in really niche locations which means that what our clients want in each of these locations really does vary quite a bit,” she said. “It’s not a vanilla approach to buying. What this will allow us to do is to get more efficient with localizing these assortments, and being able to make real time decisions, because we can see everything down to the store level in real time.”
Another advantage Mathur sees is that NuOrder will help them with Intermix’s content — editorial and marketing. It will give their partners on the marketing side visibility into their buys, what they have coming in and when — by color, by month, by trend and by classification. “We can really drive personalization and specific editorial stories,” she said.
She said that as they scale their business, the tool will give them real-time data as they’re buying. “As you know, the buying process is so fast. We’re seeing 300 brands in two weeks, and the buyers have so much to get through and it’s hard when they have to look at six different places to make a decision on something,” Mathur said. “Now this will enable the buyers to write the buys and know what works in a store and on the website and ultimately deliver an edit that’s going to be more in tune to what the customer wants,” she said.
She said NuOrder is rolling out this week, and under an accelerated plan, they’re going to launch the entire business on NuOrder by May. Buys will start to come in as of October, 2022.
“I think the investment in NuOrder for us is part of a larger view on technology improvements that Intermix is taking. We are looking at many different types of investments that will be enable to offer us a highly personalized experience across both our channels. This is definitely the first of more to come,” she said.
Intermix, which was founded in 1993 and sold to Gap in 2013, was acquired in May, 2021 by Altamont Capital.
Lightspeed, dual listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange, acquired NuOrder last year for about $425 million in cash and stock shares. Lightspeed connects approximately 3,000 brands and more than 100,000 retailers. The technology provides virtual showrooms technology, visual assortment and merchandising tools, payments and data integration.
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