New York & Co. Puts The Enjoyment Back In Customer Engagement

During New York Fashion Week in 2016,  New York and Co. hosted a runway show featuring its new Eva Mendes collection. The women’s fashion apparel and accessories chain created a shoppable video of the show for its website; the goal was to launch within several hours of the show’s start.

“The runway show started at 6, and by 8:55, the experience was live on the site,” says Paul Carroll, vice president of creative for digital and eCommerce. Five minutes after that, 2 million customers had received emails inviting them to shop the collection. The retailer’s IT team could have spent months building and coding to make the rapid video production possible. Instead, New York & Co. used the Creator tool from content-creation software firm Zmags.

Carroll began working with Zmags in the fall of 2014 to create a digital version of New York & Co.’s print catalog for the holiday season. The retailer’s existing online platform offered no streamlined process for moving print content online. While researching options, Carroll came across a compelling digital catalog Zmags had helped another retailer create. He contacted Zmags, invited its representatives in for a presentation and conducted a pilot that November through January. “I was able to turn that print catalog into a shoppable experience for both desktop and mobile in time for the holidays,” Carroll says.

Focused on experience

Zmags has two platforms; its digital catalog solution, Publicator, allows users to upload, digitize and add interactivity and functionality to catalogs and other print assets. Creator is Zmags’s “shoppable content platform,” says Lindsay Moore, vice president of business development and strategy for Zmags. It “allows anyone in marketing, merchandising, eCommerce and design to design and publish interactive, fully shoppable content without writing a single line of code.”

Rather than simply uploading images and product-detail pages, Creator enables companies to, for instance, create online experiences. A beauty brand could demonstrate “how to get the best cat-eye makeup for your skin tone with step-by-step guides and embedded videos,” Moore says.