Known for its flagship fashion brands like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People, U.S.-based URBN strives to operate in a responsible way, consciously choosing its materials and partners. As part of its sustainability journey, URBN uses Stibo Systems Platform (STEP) to support its product information management (PIM) process and share sustainability information with its consumers.
Miriam Molino Sánchez, Head of Industry Practice at Stibo Systems, sat down with Morgan Lawrence, Program Manager – PIM at URBN, for a conversation about how URBN creates unique customer experiences and supports sustainability commitments with data. Following are some highlights from their conversation:
URBN’s sustainability starting point: Its consumers
“We have an amazing consumer research team who reached out to all our consumers to say: What's important to you? What does sustainability mean to you? We got an overwhelming response about the importance, especially with our younger consumers. We knew we had to figure something out.
URBN has since grown a team that supports this both here in the U.S. and internationally. We knew we had all this information. It was very segregated. So, it was figuring out how do we build a process around this and how can we be more proactive about the information that we have that's spread out across all our supply chain management systems.”
Managing sustainability data across different brands
“All our brands definitely have their own flavor, and what we found is, at least from an URBN standpoint, we had largely the same workflow, the same data. We started with our EU team, specifically with Urban Outfitters, to say how can we capture a workflow around this so that we're pulling and syndicating all the information into the PIM. Instead of running a report to find we missed this data element, we can instead react more quickly in real time to say, we have to reach out to this vendor – we're missing this data element. What the STEP workflow is able to do is capture that real time, so that we can react in the moment instead of at the end of the day, at the end of the week. We're capturing it in that process.
But with the workflow, each brand is going to have their own process, their own sustainability requirements and goals. That workflow allows us to create automation and diverge into different swim lanes within that workflow to say this is a required element in this workflow for Anthropologie, but it's not for Urban Outfitters. We can help one brand that's further along within the sustainability goals work within the same workflow. We've got that flexibility.”
Impact of the sustainability initiatives
“The impact that we're feeling most right now is with the teams that are starting to use our sustainability workflow in STEP. We're hearing a lot of excitement around how that's going to speed up their process and get more pertinent information to our customers. We want our customers to know that this is just as important to us as it is to them.
So, it's trying to really help figure out that process that we can capture within our workflows, as we're all trying to figure out the data and the regulations on this. If we can at least build a process that helps make all this easier and allows us to adapt a lot faster, I think that's where we're really starting to feel the excitement and see the impact. It's just all opportunities.”
Lessons learned: Start small and look at process
“When we first started talking about sustainability goals, at least with our Urban Outfitters UK team, it was pie in the sky, like asking for everything under the sun. They think big, they have a lot of ideas, and it's great. We're excited that they're excited, but I think it's just such a huge problem to tackle, so try to carve out something small that you feel like you can get a handle on.
I don't think that we have to figure this out all at once and right from the start. That's when we honed in on process because if we've got a good process, we know where the data is, we can pull the data in and look at the data as we go. The process will highlight issues in the data, strengths in the data.
I would say to start small because it's a huge problem for retailers to figure out and tackle. What we've had success with so far is trying to look at the process – those handoffs – what are we doing today to highlight to our customers this is sustainable and to try and capture that.”