bonprix’s Journey: From Local Value Brand to International Fashion Company

International discount fashion brand bonprix currently operates in 25 countries. However, the company started as a value brand mainly focused on Germany. bonprix started working with EDITED™ in 2014 to further its geographical expansion. Along with gathering international data and insights into several countries, bonprix leverages EDITED to shift its positioning from being seen solely as a value brand, to a fashion brand that provides the latest trends at affordable prices across markets.

bonprix’s team aims to take a customer-centric approach to effectively target customers across all of its geographies who wear fashionable clothes and stay up-to-date with the latest trends, while maintaining affordable prices.

The Challenge: Modernizing and Premiumizing bonprix’s Offering

With an updated tagline, “Fashion Made Smarter,” bonprix hopes to appeal to its updated target customer across all geographies and establish an additional premium product assortment. However, in order to effectively understand the market, track and deliver relevant trends, increase prices, and offer more exit price point products, bonprix needs access to comprehensive data quickly.

Before EDITED, bonprix focused more heavily on the German market because, among other reasons, this data was more accessible to the local team. With the expansion of its international business, however, bonprix needed to access insights into all the different markets to ensure it adapted its strategies based on the specific circumstances of each country. EDITED provides bonprix with the data and analysis needed to expand its business.

“As the company became more international, it was very important for us to get insights into different markets, make sure we have the right assortments for the right markets, and determine if there are any differences in the countries. That was a very important part of our decision to work with EDITED.”

– Anja Ulwer, Market & Category Consulting at bonprix

Anja goes on to explain that prior to using EDITED, the process of gathering data and insights was completely manual and time-consuming: 

“We had different people who manually checked the online shops of our main competitors across different companies to get insights into what the strategy of each of them was, see if there were different pricing strategies, and see if they offer the same prices throughout Europe or if they made significant differences regionally. It was high effort.” 

With a more automated process in place with EDITED, bonprix’s team is able to access data immediately regarding competitors, countries, and assortments, as well as monitor the pricing development for its main international competitors, ensuring bonprix is on track. 

Revolutionizing Pricing with EDITED Market™

With a dynamic retail market and multiple geographies, having access to data and insights helps bonprix monitor pricing development and make necessary changes to appeal to its target audience. Anja explains that over the past few years, specifically with COVID and the supply chain issues, the team has used EDITED Market to check what the brand’s competitors are doing and, ultimately, decide which products it can increase the price on and which it cannot. 

By utilizing EDITED data to look across markets, bonprix identifies certain products that its competitors did not increase pricing for, which, if bonprix had, would’ve resulted in bad business decisions. Instead, bonprix is able to consistently see how its pricing stacks up against the competition and understand what customers are willing to pay for versus not.

For example, bonprix found that one of the key market players maintained entry price points to attract customers despite supply chain issues, but spread its pricing architecture into a wider range by offering new exit price point products in more premium products to help maintain margin. Because bonprix could track this data via EDITED, the product management team was able to realize higher prices for more valuable products while keeping entry prices the same to continue attracting value-savvy customers along with those craving higher-value items.

Using EDITED Market, the team could understand competitor pricing and add more premium products – products that customers are seeking and willing to pay higher prices for because they find them more valuable and trend-focused – and establish prices that are higher than average, but not so high that they alienate customers. Ultimately, tracking pricing across geographies allows bonprix to grow the premium segment to elevate its brand image and highlight price stretch opportunities while preserving margin, which is critical to profitability.

Refining Communication with EDITED Messaging™

Along with product and pricing information, another piece of bonprix’s journey in becoming more of a “fashion brand” requires an understanding of how competitors and aspirational brands communicate to their customers.

bonprix uses EDITED Messaging to understand its competitors’ promotional activity across categories, products, and geographies. Anja explains, “Without EDITED Messaging, we would have to go into our email to see competitor newsletters or promotions, search for each competitor, take screenshots, and then go through every one manually. We also would not have the opportunity to look at historical home pages or understand changes over time in just seconds.” 

One example of how bonprix adjusts its positioning with the help of EDITED is its Mother’s Day promotional activity. The brand used to have a traditional messaging and communication strategy around the holiday. However, with EDITED Messaging, the team can see real-time and historical examples of how competitors approach the topic. bonprix realized through this research that its own strategy was off base and no longer resonating with customers. The team was then able to modernize its communications strategy in line with its product offering and create more inclusive messaging.

Messaging is a critical part of becoming a fashion brand. It is essential for brands to know what their competitors do to create customer moments that are fashion-led and see information on what appeals to consumers. Shifting from solely value-based to fashion-based is not just about having excellent products and pricing; it’s also about your messaging, how you position yourself, and what story you tell – it’s about creating a cohesive brand story.

EDITED’s Impact on bonprix’s Evolution 

EDITED’s data and analysis help bonprix appeal to the new fashion-forward target across geographies. Anja shares that, “[because] the data from EDITED is available at any time and for a wide range of competitors and countries, we save a lot of time and make use of this to dig deeper into other topics. We did not cut down the people, but we are now able to do other things and be more strategic.”

Because using EDITED saves bonprix so much time, the team can be more responsive to evolving trends, propelling them toward their aspiration of being a fashion-forward brand, and, ultimately, making better and more informed decisions.

With EDITED, bonprix not only owns its new tagline, “Fashion Made Smarter,” but effectively redefines its brand by adapting to various geographies and customer preferences, ensuring a dynamic and sustainable future for the business.