CASE STUDY
Crate&Barrel
Driving double-digit sales growth for a home goods retailer
Challenge
After several years of disappointing performance and a lack of brand clarity, Crate&Barrel reached out to Prophet to help diagnose the issue and determine a solution to turn the business around.
We worked with the Crate&Barrel team to transform its retail branding strategy and implement it across the key aspects of the business – brand, merchandising, store experience and service offers.
Solutions
Our retail branding work began by developing a deep understanding of the market and customers. Our segmentation research uncovered the opportunity for Crate&Barrel to win by focusing on an under-penetrated high-value segment. Based on this new target, we repositioned the brand to be relevant to its needs, defining the critical product and experience elements – both unique brand assets and critical gaps to invest behind – required to win and drive growth.
Part of the formula for success meant Crate&Barrel needed to inspire and engage this target customer, while also making the stores more profitable. As part of this new retail brand strategy we identified opportunities to make the store more effective through SKU optimization, cross-merchandising and product distortion recommendations. Crate&Barrel moved quickly to bring it to life in new social media stories and marketing campaigns to capture attention and encourage the target to take another look at the brand.
At the same time, Prophet began to focus on a longer-term plan to create a more engaging, impactful and immersive store design for Crate&Barrel. It would deliver on the brand strategy and result in increased cross-shopping, dwell time and traffic. We also identified opportunities for growth through new design services offering to increase transaction size while also better serving the consumer.
Results
From insights gathering to strategy to execution, Prophet collaborated closely with Crate&Barrel leadership to diagnose the issues and develop solutions to support the in-market execution of the new retail strategy. After less than 12 months in the market, the business began to see significant improvement in sales and traffic. In fact, the brand saw double digits growth in sales.