Intradeco Holdings and First Insight have joined forces to tackle customer concerns and bring best-selling products to market faster.
The global vertical manufacturing company that supplies casual clothing to brands like Wrangler and Lee has partnered with the voice of the customer (VoC) retail solutions provider to expand its retail and brand network. Intradeco aims to do so by pulling “predictive and actionable data,” such as silhouette preferences and print or pattern partialities, from First Insight’s VoC platform, which enables users to answer the retail-centric questions their customers frequently ask. The goal, the LCA-certified manufacturing company said, is to “elevate product design and market acceptance.”
“First Insight’s use of predictive analytics will add a great deal of value to the retailers we service and allow us to elevate our product design and assortment,” Lora Murphy, Intradeco’s senior vice president, design and merchandising, said. “Nearly all information in the market comes from an historical perspective, but tapping into current data from the customer gives us a critical point of view missing from typical trend and sales analyses.”
First Insight’s VoC InsightSuite platform users first determine their goals, such as a question they need an answer to or a decision they need to make. Then, users upload photos of what those goals are—such as physical products, marketing materials or survey questions—through the management interface. Then they construct a customer panel, which can be developed from social media or sourced from First Insight’s consumer panel partners. Those panels then provide feedback on the data it was fed via “gamified digital surveys” that collect the voice of the customer data. Finally, First Insight’s predictive algorithms separate “the signal from the noise to the output actional insights” via dashboards, reports and product ranking tables.
“We are thrilled to work with Intradeco to test their product designs, merchandising assortment and sustainability messaging,” Greg Petro, First Insight’s CEO, said. “[VoC] data allows Intradeco to de-risk the product assortment for their retail partners, ultimately reducing waste, overproduction and markdowns.”
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Intradeco, a supplier and licensor of performance apparel with a nearshoring model and manufacturing facilities in Central America, said it’s positioned to give partners “greater flexibility” than competitors further offshore. Furthermore, First Insight’s fast VoC data delivery—the company said it can turn around actionable insights within 48 hours—should allow Intradeco to hit the market faster with products expected to be top sellers. Combining those two elements becomes “very exciting to think about what [Intradeco] can bring our customers in terms of increased financial results,” Terry Trofholz, Intradeco’s head of sales, said. The manufacturer will also lean on First Insight’s platform to advance its “sustainability messaging and consumer resonance.”
For mass producers such as Intradeco, First Insight’s platform combines AI with consumer insights to help “connect the dots” between assortment offerings, pricing, marketplaces and consumers to optimize, Petro said.
“VoC answers specific questions retailers have around new product offerings, merchandise assortments, pricing, marketing and supply chain,” Petro continued. “It moves the decision from ‘I think we should’ and ‘I feel we should’ to ‘our customers said we should.’ [Our] VoC provides actionable insights regarding next season’s items for assortment design and planning purposes as well as regarding in-season items for promotion, markdown and inventory management decisions. It’s important to wholesalers like Intradeco by helping them understand their retail and brand partners consumer better, thereby being a better supplier-partner.”