John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer of Coremetrics posed a couple of rhetorical questions to the audience to launch the session.

Is this downturn an isolated event? How important are benchmarks and what can they tell us?

Coremetrics has collected data across its customer base in aggregate and created a free benchmark report for retailers to download.

Beyond benchmark data, retailers have to look at ways of exceeding those numbers. Common ingredients for innovation found across a number of related books are:

• Passion for direction
• Dedication to disruption
• Willingness to take on risk

Two pure-play retailers shared how they have addressed innovation.

Mark Katz, CEO & Founder, CustomInk

The market for customized products is growing and innovation has been key to delivering this unique purchasing experience. CustomInk has an aggressive stance on being transparent and creating customer affinity by meeting their unique buying needs. Customer satisfaction is over 99%, and when you ship over 5 million shirts each year, that is no small feat.

The best example is the open and uncensored comments on the company’s homepage along with a publicly viewable/searchable database of feedback. That takes guts, or not – let me remind you of the customer sat figure above! An open company usually takes advantage of user generated content and CustomInk is no different. They solicit customer pictures and stories for follow on marketing programs. These images and stories are collected using contest incentives and end up being self fulfilling (use images to promote a contest to collect images).

Instead of hiding behind ‘business-speak’ or an otherwise generic company profile, they are very descriptive and open about all parts of the history, operations, and people in order to create customer affinity, and it seems to be working. Being close to the customer has lead to other innovations like the sizing lineup. A large number of order are made for groups but by a single individual. The size linup helps that person estimate the approximate fit of each shirt for each person in the group. It’s a virtual measuring stick, in a police line up fashion.

Tomima Edmark, CEO & Founder, Andra Group (HerRoom.com, HisRoom.com).

Her retail company sells men’s and women’s under garments. It is a very visual category and Tomima really knows what makes her customers tick. Images are key and she has nailed it.

On the women’s side each bra has the following:

• Glam shot – supplied by the manufacturer that maintains campaign recognition
• Plain shot – manequin or generic model cropped to exclude the face (front, back, and detail shots)
• Set shot – many items have a matching lower garment that creates an ensemble
• Large size – some large sizes have additional supports, these images are displayed where relevant
• Under top views – 6 challenging necklines for bra selection (how does the bra look under the shirt)

For sports bras the challenge is how they perform so they have created slow motion video of women using the product. This is something a real world shopping experience could rarely replicate. Very innovative and gets to the heart of what the customer needs to know to make an informed decision – beyond just reading textual descriptions most likely written by men, or women of varying body types.

They have also addressed the uncertainties involved with purchasing shapewear. Will it really help, or is it unable to shape my body type? Women often have doubts but it’s simple. Show a real women in before and after photos. Done. Again, innovation only recognized by knowing where your customer’s head is at.

On the men’s side of things they have produced a texture scale. If silk is a 1 and terry cloth is a 10, they can rate every other material in between and a shopper has a pretty good indication of what to expect. They have even gone on to create texture as a navigation facet.

The bottom line in each of these retail examples is know your cutomer. Not just how they behave on the site, but how they operate, think, dream, etc. When you fully understand them, creating differentiating functionality will not seem like innovation, it will seem like the normal course of business.