Sneak peek: Kate Spade Saturday
New York tech design firm, Control Group revealed its project with the Kate Spade Saturday brand which brings the online experience into the brick and mortar stores, with iPads set up throughout the store, featuring content relevant to items in proximity.
The devices offer style suggestions, video, user-generated images, and marketing messages to encourage engagement with the Kate Spade Saturday brand. The tech infusion is built on a flexible framework that will allow additional devices, stores, countries, languages, and media as the brand expands and evolves.
The project launched this month in Tokyo, and will launch in New York later this month, rolling out to all Kate Spade stores throughout 2013. This re-imagining of the retail environment engages shoppers and offers a more fluid experience for customers, which will likely be copied by other retailers, particularly bigger brands.
It’s all about “brand immersion”
“What we’ve done with Kate Spade Saturday is less about point-of-sale marketing and digital signage and more about brand immersion in a new era of retail,” said Colin O’Donnell, Partner at Control Group. “The new shopping experience is designed to increase dwell time, encourage more social shopping, and provide easy access to product information. This will translate into a more rewarding relationship between Kate Spade and their customers.”
“We want to make our in-store experience as rich and innovative as our web site, and this will be an important component of achieving that goal,” said Kyle Andrew, SVP brand director of Kate Spade Saturday.
Consumers have become accustomed to finding inspiration online, building outfits and getting tips, but adding that layer of interactivity into a store is new, and it isn’t just marketing messages, but creatively inspires shoppers through user-generated content as well, a play that will most certainly be duplicated and spread to other stores and sectors.
