How heritage brand Lane Bryant competes in a growing market

The Challenge

Lane Bryant is the largest plus-sized retailer in the US. Lena Bryant, the founder, began her fashion career as a seamstress in 1879. Lena’s responsiveness to her customers led to the launch of a plus-size clothing line in 1923. Since there were no ready-made clothes available for this customer, Lena and her team measured over 4,500 individual customers, and used statistics on some 200,000 women to create three core plus-size fit styles.

In an era of enormous growth for the plus-sized market due to an influx of new competitors, Lane Bryant needs to understand the breadth of sizes available across the plus-size market to make sure they are offering their customers the widest selection of choices. “EDITED has been a great part of the toolbox in our size-monitoring work. It has helped to quickly and accurately verify our own intelligence, expand on it, and identify additional sizing opportunities,” said Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of marketing.

EDITED Market™ helped Lane Bryant quickly identify new trends and design products to provide their customers with fresh style options, while helping Lane Bryant recognize their core bestselling pieces. “EDITED provides us data for trend analysis significantly faster and more accurately than we can collect it with manual web searches,” commented Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of marketing. “Plus, their published reports are on par with, or often better than, other commonly used retail reporting sources.”

Lane Bryant used to manually collect market information through website searches and in-person store visits. Using EDITED’s market analytics tools helps Lane Bryant make data-driven decisions to understand competitive challenges, and swiftly shift promotional and pricing strategies to react to a quickly-evolving market. “EDITED puts actionable supplemental competition insights at our fingertips, without adding work!,” stated Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of marketing.

Lane Bryant also leveraged EDITED Messaging™ to identify ideal promotional timing and content. Previously this had been done using historical data. But with the help of the heat map tool, the team was able to pinpoint in real time the optimal timing for this content, changing the email delivery cadence to a day earlier, resulting in an increase in email open rates. “Using EDITED we can see competitors’ and hundreds of other brands’ digital marketing with just a few clicks.” said Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of marketing.

The Solution

EDITED Market supports Lane Bryant’s goal of “digital-first” to provide their customer with a seamless experience between in-store and online.

“It is important for us to adopt a digital-first approach at Lane Bryant to cater to our customers’ needs and ensure her experience with us is as simple and straightforward as possible. We want her to have the opportunity to not only shop with us in stores but have a seamless online shopping experience as well,” said Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of marketing.

EDITED’s market intelligence technology allowed us to discover how our offerings compare to those of our competitors’ online from a choice count perspective,” Adam Rohletter continued. “This helped us understand that there is opportunity for more online exclusives in order to expand our customers’ options and give our clients more products to choose from when shopping online.”

“As we work to create a frictionless, omnichannel experience, having access to even more competitor information and market data allows us to make better decisions faster, and helps us generate even more new ideas, which we see as positively affecting our business,” concluded Adam Rohletter, Lane Bryant’s AVP of marketing.

Data-driven from the start, it’s no wonder that Lane Bryant, the “Pioneers of Plus,” chose EDITED’s suite of software tools in 2018 to support the brand’s growth.

How heritage brand Lane Bryant competes in a growing market

The Challenge

The Solution

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