How ZGallerie Furniture created true-to-life brand experiences online

Summary

A lot has changed since Kristen Gall, VP of eCommerce at  Gallerie, started her career in retail as soon as she was old enough to work.

From launching her career as a retail management program trainee, and eventually a Merchandiser at Gap and Levi Strauss & Co, to eventually becoming the Head of women’s Denim Merchandising at Gap, she is deeply attuned to what it takes to create an enjoyable experience for shoppers.

“It was 10 years ago that I found digital,” Gall says. “This was an area in which I could react and respond quickly. It was data-driven, visual, and became my next love in the industry.”

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Flash forward to 2015—the year that Gall joined ZGallerie, a contemporary home-goods retailer with $100M+ in annual revenue. With the world of “big box” retail slowing down and eCommerce experiencing a boom, Gall found herself in a uniquely innovative role.

“We have a very different aesthetic from a lot of our competitors,” says Gall.

“I love that we have the ability to tell stories about our products. That makes us more of a lifestyle brand than a furniture retailer. We’re incredibly omnichannel. The story you see in the stores is the story you see on the website and in catalogs.”

To say that it’s challenging to sell furniture in a digital, mobile-first world is an understatement. People want to do more than simply buy a product that meets a need.

“You want to touch it,” elaborates Gall. “You want to feel it. You want to sit on it. Furniture is a really big investment and something that you want to think about.”

Gall’s team strives to bring the experience of a retail showroom to a digital, mobile-first world.

“When you click through an email, does what you see match your expectations?” asks Gall. “What kind of marketing and messaging are we giving you that brings you down a path towards a purchase? You’re capturing someone’s imagination and then you’re bringing them down a very logical sequence of decisions. What would they need to know vs. later? What might their hesitations be in making a purchase?”

Tangiblee helps Gall and her team answer those lingering questions and hesitations.

“You create a confidence level that what they’re buying is what they’re going to get and help them understand what that item is going to look like in their home,” she says. It’s this business challenge that brought ZGallerie to Tangiblee’s scalable product enhancing technology - giving shoppers a realistic perspective of what they’re eyeing.

“I first saw Tangiblee on the Bloomingdales website,” says Gall. “It was a straightforward execution of what ZGallerie needed. While there’s a lot of buzz in the eCommerce world right now about virtual reality and augmented reality, I find that technology in these areas is impractical for a few reasons, at least for now: number one, they’re expensive and number two, they don’t do what I need them to do to solve my customer’s problems.”

Tangiblee's Value

“Tangiblee helps our customers get past their points of pause, to get them to purchase, and click on the buy button. The technology helps us execute on our omni-channel goals. The vignette that we tell on our homepage connects to our catalogs, which connects to the story within our stores.”

“There are so many technology partners out there,” says Gall. “We won’t consider working with one unless it tackles a direct need for our customer.”

“What’s really important to our team is that Tangiblee has helped us engage our high-value customers better,” says Gall.

“Number one, the vast majority of customers who are using the Tangiblee are our furniture customers, and the vast majority of people clicking into the tool are our furniture buyers.Tangiblee has helped us increase our AOV per customer. Shoppers who interact with Tangiblee are converting at 2x our site-wide conversion rate. Overall, we’re seeing more interaction with our products across our categories.”

By the end of 2018, nearly 65% of ZGallerie’s mobile shoppers and more than 15% of ALL shoppers are interacting with Tangiblee on ZGallerie's website.