“When women succeed, the world becomes a better place.”

That’s the core belief held by M.M.LaFleur, an apparel brand well-known for styling modern working women, whether in the office or at home. For over a decade, M.M.LaFleur has been offering high-quality capsule pieces that are both stylish and functional. The brand’s ability to curate personalized wardrobes is the key to their loyal customer base, who care about style, but find their time better spent on other things. 

So it’s fitting that this past International Women’s Day, we were lucky enough to connect with Taylor Purcell, Senior Manager of Retail at M.M.LaFleur, who climbed the ranks from customer service during her seven year tenure with the brand. She was kind enough to share just how their team leverages the Endear CRM to offer a level of personalized clienteling that’s unique in retail, and how this strategy has led to higher sales and a loyal customer base.

“Personalization has always been part of our vision, from our pop-ups to our virtual appointments. Our current customer visits are primarily appointment-based. They want that hand-holding experience with our stylists. And we’re always thinking of better ways to deliver that clienteling experience. We’re thinking, ‘how can we show her this item on, say, a virtual appointment?”

With hyper-personalization a core concept driving their actions, M.M.LaFleur is seeing a reply rate of 30% on their email communications, when other professional brands are seeing rates in the single digit percentages. It’s clear that M.M.LaFleur has built real connections with their customers, and knows how to maintain them. Amazingly, the brand is delivering this level of personalized communication with teams made up of just five people across their stores.

“If you can strategically set up workflows, like we do in Endear, you can send many messages with a small team. We have it set up to automatically send emails off certain triggers.

“It all comes from how much we glean from our customers during our styling appointments. We make note of what they like, whether they want to reconnect in a month. We notify them when we’re about to launch a collection they might enjoy, and ask if they want to book an appointment.”

That’s the level of client communication that we at Endear strive to empower all of our brands to build with their customers. So how did M.M.LaFleur achieve such deep relationships with their clients?

“Styling is a part of everything we do. As our founder Sarah [LaFleur] likes to say, if one of our items doesn't come with styling, then it’s not M.M.LaFleur. We’ve heard from customers who’ve told us ‘I got my dream job wearing your jacket!’ or ‘I got a promotion wearing your brand!’ and we just love that type of feedback.”

M.M.LaFleur is one of Endear’s longest partnerships, and one of the features in the Endear CRM that Taylor and her team uses the most is a tool that was once known as LookBooks, now called Shoppable Stories.

“From the beginning, we wanted to use Shoppable Stories to enhance how we personalized our messaging and take it to the next level. Our customers will spend an hour with us during our styling appointments and will want to remember the outfits they saw. These lookbooks were a great way to remind them. Or they’ll say to us ‘I’m going on a ten day business trip to London, can you curate some outfits for me?’ We’ll use Stories to send them not just the items they might love, but how to style them as well.”

And it works. M.M.LaFleur’s average order value (AOV) of sales attributed through Endear is over 60% higher than sales unattributed through the Endear CRM. M.M.LaFleur’s high AOV is a testament to the powerful impact that having both a rich understanding of customer needs and the ability to use conversation to solve them can be to the bottom line.

“We showcase the value of individual pieces by connecting them back to other styles. This jacket may cost $500, but we’ll show you 30 different ways to wear it.”

“We send thank you notes through Endear after every purchase. We send specialized follow-ups through Shoppable Stories. If we know that Britney, for example, buys a lot of suits online and she’s based in D.C., we can let her know that all of our suit options are at our D.C. store and invite her in."

“Shoppable Stories are an important feature, but the Endear platform is what’s important to connect and engage with customers. We keep track of everything in the CRM, and we embed it into our operations."

“Endear is not just another marketing channel for us. It’s not just, ‘Hey, we have a hoodie in red now.’ It’s intentional and thoughtful. We drill home with our team that if an email is not going to be helpful, we don’t need to send it. We first ask, ‘What are we giving her to make her stand out from the crowd?’”

Thanks, Taylor! We hope M.M.LaFleur continues to have successful outreach and customer retention with Endear.
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