Introduction

Landmark Group’s Max is a leading omnichannel value brand in the Middle East, targeting a broad audience with affordable fashion. The family brand caters to customers across demographics to make fashion democratic and accessible. 

With over 226 stores and an online presence across GCC, India, and SEA, Max endeavors to offer a seamless shopping experience for both online and brick-and-mortar channels. Max understands the importance of localizing its offerings to resonate with regional audiences and tailor its strategy to align with customers’ local sentiments and preferences. 

New Frontiers, New Technology: How Max Delivers Trends With Confidence

Over the past few years, Max’s team recognized a significant shift in both their customer base and their own online strategy. As new competitors continue to emerge, the team’s need for comprehensive data regarding what’s happening in the market to validate decision-making has increased.  

During this journey, retail intelligence has become a crucial piece of Max’s strategy. 

Ankur Srivastava, Max’s Head of Design, recalls the pre-EDITED days as a time of manual mayhem: “Compiling market intelligence meant half-day marathons spent scouring competitor and aspirational brand websites, just to identify new product launches. This manual process left little time for broader product team collaboration.” 

Enter EDITED, a “game-changer for market intelligence.” EDITED’s curated dashboards help provide real-time market insights. Max’s team can now not only save valuable time, but also monitor competitor assortments with incredible granularity – tracking week-over-week or even day-over-day changes. This real-time awareness allows Max to stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly competitive world. 

“For us as designers, EDITED has helped bring more objectivity to a largely subjective discussion. Designers can now stand for their ideas with facts and logic by looking at the data on investments, market shifts, and how product assortment is shifting over time. EDITED has been a game changer for us in that way,” says Ankur Srivastava. 

Taking a Personalized Approach

Freed from the time-consuming manual competitive analysis, Max’s team has reclaimed those hours to determine the right strategy for the brand. Armed with EDITED’s comprehensive insights, the team can deep dive into customer behavior and shopping patterns across various retailers and markets. This newfound agility allows Max to perform targeted analyses, exemplified by their ability to identify bestsellers in specific regions – from Saudi Arabia to the UAE and even the UK. 

“EDITED is a comp shop assistant at your fingertips.”

These insights and market intelligence have helped the team understand regional nuances in shopping patterns, allowing Max to identify what resonates with customers in one region, but might not translate to another. 

Using EDITED’s data visualization tools, Max’s team can analyze color assortments, best-selling prints, first-discounted styles, and how successful a trend is for a particular retailer. This research goes beyond validating gut instinct and empowers the team with data to confidently curate bespoke ranges tailored for different customer groups within each region, ultimately personalizing the shopping experience across diverse markets. 

Data-Driven Decision Making With EDITED: The Results

Specifically, the Max team uses EDITED Market, EDITED Messaging, and EDITED Research to help validate decisions from trend identification to range planning and weekly reviews.

Ayesha Adams, Max’s Head of Merchandise Planning, says, “We have benefited from the validation EDITED provides in terms of color balance, range, and new trends or shapes we are going for. We also use it to analyze internal competition and market discounting. It gives us the merchandising validation that we are going after the right strategy.”

1. Maximizing Modesty for Ramadan

Ahead of Ramadan this year, Max faced a crucial decision. Anecdotal insights from stores and customer feedback suggested a customer preference for maxi skirts over midi. However, Max needed concrete data to validate the shift. 

Using EDITED Market, Max’s team gained valuable insights into how global retailers approached modesty in their assortments, specifically around Ramadan, by analyzing competitor ranges for midi and maxi skirts across relevant geographies. The data showed a clear trend: competitors were emphasizing maxi skirts. This data gave Max the reassurance to balance its ranges and add more maxi skirt options.

Max’s team then leveraged EDITED Messaging to visualize when competitors mentioned “Ramadan” or “modesty” in their product descriptions. By analyzing 2023 trends, Max could optimize its 2024 assortment strategy and ensure its maxi skirts were the highlight during the peak sales period. 

2. Bringing on the Right Trends: Crochet Tops

Through competitive research and trend reports from EDITED Market and Research, Max’s design team identified another emerging trend – men’s crochet shirts. Initially, the merchandise planning team was hesitant and feared that the trend wouldn’t resonate with their mass-market base. However, with data from EDITED, the design team presented compelling evidence and convinced the planners to embrace the trend. 

Ayesha elaborated that they cautiously introduced six options to the range, all of which outperformed expectations with fast sell outs and average stock over of three and a half weeks on shelves. This success story fueled rebuys and instilled confidence in the company to make bolder trend decisions moving forward.

3. Capitalizing on Quiet Luxury in Men’s Footwear

With EDITED’s trend-tracking abilities, Max capitalized on the burgeoning “Quiet Luxury” movement, recognizing the rising popularity of the buzzword across the market. The team used this data to strategize a complete overhaul of their men’s footwear range to fit the aesthetic and relied on EDITED to select the most profitable silhouettes, colors, and pricing strategies.

This data-driven approach has yielded impressive results. Max grew its footwear options +23% YoY in 2023, with footwear driving an increased mix of sell outs – 25% in 2023 versus 16% in 2022. 

4. Bringing on Baggy: The Rise of Cargo Pants

Max’s Design and Buying teams have become adept at using EDITED’s top-mover methodology, which empowers them to identify trending products and capitalize on trading opportunities. 

Through EDITED, the team identified the rise in popularity of oversized, baggy, and loose-fitting styles and could see how the share of assortment was shifting and what was successful in the market. They identified cargos were trending and, in a strategic move, decided to add 20 options to their range, resulting in strong sell-through rates at full price, generating a remarkable £350K in gross sales.  

What’s Next – myEDITED

Max’s forward-thinking approach extends to their data analysis tools. Just this month, Max’s team incorporated myEDITED™, EDITED’s single-access dashboard, into their weekly review process. This tool allows users to visualize combined internal company data and real-time market insights within a user-friendly interface. 

Ayesha Adams shares, “ …[myEDITED™] is very easy to use with ready-made dashboards that you can quickly click onto, where you can see something immediately. From our perspective, it is almost an introduction to the tool, which will lead us backward into EDITED to ask more advanced questions and utilize the dashboards to dive deeper into our business. myEDITED™ gives us ideas of questions we might want to ask of our business.”

Considering Max’s fast-paced environment, myEDITED™ seems to be a perfect fit. It allows the team to access connected insights swiftly, save customized dashboards, repeat behaviors, and automate workflows. Max will use this curated data feed as another means to strengthen its team with data to ensure they capitalize on the right opportunities.

Conclusion

Max’s partnership with EDITED has transformed its approach to market analysis processes. This collaboration empowers numerous teams to make data-driven decisions across various aspects of the business, from design to merchandising. 

By leveraging real-time data and insights provided by EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform, Max has been able to stay ahead of evolving trends, optimize its product assortments, and capitalize on emerging opportunities in all the markets it serves.

As Max continues to prioritize innovation and customer-centric strategies, its collaboration with EDITED is a testament to its commitment to delivering on its core value: making fashion truly accessible and democratic for all.