ALDO: Putting its best foot forward for consumers with a unified e-commerce system
Delivering a consistent customer experience
ALDO Group’s founding vision was to create a different kind of fashion company built around respect, integrity, and a deep understanding of the customer. A connected e-commerce ecosystem underpinned by SAP solutions enables insights and experiences that are helping bring this vision to life.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Montreal, Canada | 5,200 employees |
Vice President, Digital Product and Experience, ALDO Group Inc.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Montreal, Canada | 5,200 employees |
Vice President, Digital Product and Experience, ALDO Group Inc.
Defining what’s next for consumers and how to deliver
With its signature brands ALDO, Call It Spring, and GLOBO, ALDO Group Inc. lets consumers express their true selves through quality footwear, handbags, and accessories. More than 1,500 stores in over 100 countries offer shoppers style, variety, and comfort at the right price.
Staying relevant in a complex and fast-moving retail environment while increasing profitability is always tough, and particularly so in challenging economic times. As Gregoire Baret, the company’s vice president for digital product and experience, says, “Customers want more, better, everywhere. It’s a permanent race to keep up and grow our bond with them. We’re trying to bring service excellence to them and make sure we meet their expectations, whether that’s about payment options, shipping options, or social media connections. It’s about getting it better, faster, at a fair price with full transparency for consumers. And it’s about making this work everywhere on all channels.”
ALDO Group envisions an integrated commerce experience in which e-commerce, in-store point-of-sale (POS), and ordering solutions act as one. With the right solutions, the company would be able to integrate e-commerce and digitalized offerings, helping it, for example, reduce customer returns, which contributes to its sustainability program. And it would be able to connect shoppers with the right products based on availability, location, segmentation, and preferences.
Vice President, Digital Product and Experience, ALDO Group Inc.
Connecting data and systems to provide the experience shoppers expect
ALDO integrated and deployed the SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement solutions and the SAP Customer Activity Repository application as the foundation of its new core customer experience solution. SAP Customer Activity Repository would enable real-time inventory visibility based on a 360-degree view of customer purchase history and demand across channels, demand forecasting to help optimize shopper experiences, and customer insights to personalize marketing.
Collectively these offerings help the ALDO Group smoothly connect digital transactions, inventory management, and customer engagement. In addition, as Baret explains, a cloud-based approach offers “more scalability, more security, and more horsepower when we need to boost our system performance.”
Another advantage of implementing SAP solutions is their composable approach, which enables flexibility and smooth integration with the company’s broader technology landscape to support current and future growth. The ALDO Group would be able to combine the feature-rich core capabilities of SAP solutions with the ability to customize at its own pace and rapidly deploy vetted, certified, and integrated solutions from SAP’s partner ecosystem.
Vice President, Digital Product and Experience, ALDO Group Inc.
Reacting nimbly to changing needs
The improved connectivity, scalability, and modularity of ALDO’s core e-commerce landscape now enable the agility to offer shoppers the services they want, when they want them. By combining SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement, the ALDO Group can engage across channels and drive conversion efficiently to achieve profitable growth.
To improve product discovery, SAP Commerce Cloud provides comprehensive listing and product page capabilities with filtering options that present the right product and connect the inventory system to help ensure product availability. The ALDO Group can personalize pages with relevant social content and offer a smooth checkout, which is, in Baret’s words, “a key moment where you need to build trust.” The connected ecosystem also means the company can better manage sales during peak periods such as the holiday season.
The composable approach of SAP solutions helps the company act quickly to keep up with consumer expectations. Baret elaborates, “We have a ‘headless’ approach, which means the front and back ends are decoupled. So, we can be very targeted in the way we act and focus on specific components in a very independent and flexible manner. This is critical for us because we have tons of different applications. We need them to work together as one unified and living system.”
Accurate data is key to the consumer experience, and quality and accessibility of data have also improved. The ALDO Group can now better combine product, inventory, customer engagement, and transactional information to not only offer great service but also tap into technologies such as AI. For example, the company can explore the use of AI to make recommendations that guide consumers based on segments, behavior, and navigation. And the technology could also help the ALDO Group improve demand forecasting, inventory management, and resource allocation. “All of this is key for us to bring the right level of relevant service to consumers,” says Baret.
Reaching net-zero emissions targets aided by a core customer experience
Looking ahead, SAP solutions will continue to play an important role in promoting ALDO Group’s sustainability goals through e-commerce and digitalization initiatives ranging from site-performance optimization to demand forecasting.
Baret says, “It’s been 10 years since we’ve been on our journey for sustainability, and we have reduced emissions related to direct operations by more than 70%. This is only a beginning, and we believe digitalization will play an active role in getting us there. We already have carbon-neutral shipping and can do more in optimizing inventory allocation and logistics as well as properly managing hardware to avoid replacing it by fixing or refurbishing it instead. We believe this is critical for us to be able to reach our goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.”