Real-time consumer activation at PVH

PVH – globally known for its iconic brands Calvin Klein & Tommy Hilfiger – is one of the world’s largest and most admired fashion companies, operating in over 40 countries worldwide.

PVH Europe’s ambition is to transform from a transaction-led fashion wholesaler into a consumer-led, multichannel fashion player with a tripled ecommerce business by 2025. To turn this vision into reality, PVH wants to connect with its consumers “in the moment”, which implies serving consumers in real-time based on their needs. For example, providing real-time transparency on delivery and payment status, offering personalized recommendations, or promptly providing adequate customer support in case of an incident.

PVH asked SparkOptimus to help shape the path to achieve this ambition, and kickstart execution to gain early momentum.

Together with PVH, we shaped their overall consumer data strategy, designed & implemented the enabling tech & data foundation, and supported roll-out of the first pilot use cases.

First, we kicked off our journey with PVH by detailing their consumers’ needs and ideating use cases to activate consumers ‘in the moment’. Via workshops with >30 participants representing 10+ business teams, we captured and prioritized an abundance of ideas to serve PVH’s consumers better. We then shaped the overall journey towards PVH’s North Star ambition of becoming a consumer-led fashion player, that triples the ecommerce revenues towards 2025.

Second, we designed the required tech & data foundation for real-time data collection & streaming, and initiated and monitored the subsequent ‘build’. The latter required a multi-disciplinary way of working between the technology, analytics, and business departments, for which we established structured operational heartbeats as well as an agile way of working with the development teams. In parallel, we detailed the prioritized use-cases together with business owners by specifying the measurements of success, the business & tech requirements, and the pilot & scaling approach.

And finally, we conducted a thorough handover to the PVH team to equip them to continue the pace independently. During that phase, we kicked off the implementation of the first use cases while increasingly adopting the role of coach and sparring partner, doubling down on capability building while capturing all executional steps and templates in an overarching playbook. We also defined the required in-house team and capabilities for the short, medium, and long term (incl. short term job descriptions) before completing the hand-over.