Projects/Digital Transformation/End-to-End Digital Transformation in China for Moschino
End-to-End Digital Transformation in China for Moschino
Moschino
In this case study, discover the formation of a tailored 3-year digital transformation roadmap in China for Moschino to significantly increase brand sales and resonance in China, empower online and offline sales, and drive customer retention.
About the Client: Moschino
Moschino, the renowned Italian luxury fashion house founded by Franco Moschino in Milan in 1983, is celebrated for its whimsical and campy designs. Fully acquired by Aeffe Group in 2021, the brand is now distributed in nearly 90 countries with boutiques in all key fashion capitals around the world.
After its online debut on Tmall in 2018, followed by JD.com in 2019, and the direct takeover of local retail distribution in 2022, Moschino has expanded its presence in the thriving China market, which is the chief contributor to the brand’s revenue in Asia.
In an effort to better engage with its Chinese customer base where interactions are highly social on platforms like WeChat, Moschino collaborated with IT Consultis (ITC) to accelerate its digital transformation in China.
Challenges and Goals
The primary goals for Moschino were to drastically increase the Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), build a full Private Traffic/First-party database, and ensure a phenomenal customer experience from retail to online leveraging the best Chinese systems, such as Loyalty, WeCom, and Social CRM…
Based on audits of Moschino's digital channels, ITC helped the brand allocate its budget for a three-year digital transformation roadmap tailored specifically for China, taking into account evolving business needs, technical constraints, and data compliance regulations.
Simultaneously, this initiative supported Moschino's rebranding and repositioning efforts after parting ways with their previous creative director, Jeremy Scott.
The final deliverable consisted of (1) a loyalty program empowering customer retention, (2) an online and retail clienteling strategy, and (3) integrated marketing automation to maximize the value of data assets. In essence, ITC helped create a closed-loop data ecosystem foundation for Moschino.
Solution 1: Loyalty WeChat Mini Program - Enhancing Customer Retention
The digitalization roadmap kicked off with the development of a robust loyalty program to address the critical issue of lost customer data. To secure buy-in from the global team, ITC conducted extensive market research, analyzing 20 luxury brands in China as benchmarks for Moschino's initial loyalty strategy.
Serving as the Project Management Office (PMO), ITC collaborated not only with Moschino's internal e-Commerce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Marketing teams but also with numerous external vendors in China and Italy, including Point of Sale (POS), Customer Data Platform (CDP), Retail, and IT.
The goal was to establish an omnichannel infrastructure while ensuring compliance with China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL).
To achieve this, Moschino opted for Laravel, an open-source technology, as the technological foundation to develop a customized loyalty WeChat Mini Program MVP that:
- Enables a comprehensive collection of loyalty and coupon data
- Incentivizes customers to make in-store purchases and the internal team to implement CRM in retail stores
Remarkably, within a month of launching, thousands of users, including both existing and new loyalty members, were onboarded!
Solution 2: WeCom Clienteling Strategy – Empowering Retail and Customer Engagement
Recognizing the challenges faced by the Retail team during the COVID pandemic with reduced foot traffic, ITC also introduced a clienteling strategy leveraging WeCom, a professional clienteling solution interoperable with WeChat.
This initiative aimed to empower the Retail, Marketing, and CRM teams to:
- Nurture customer relationships
- Amplify the reach of Moschino’s marketing content via WeCom Moments
- Facilitate remote selling
- Capture direct customer data for building customer profiles
By September 2023, ITC has trained over 100 sales associates across all direct and outlet Moschino stores in China, empowering the brand to recruit tens of thousands of clients and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
Notably, this has also given the Moschino General Manager a holistic view of China stores’ performance while still based in Hong Kong.
One example of leveraging WeCom Moments for marketing promotions is when the brand announced its new house ambassador, actress Esther Yu. In particular, the 4-day WeCom Moments series helped:
- Drive more existing WeCom customers to Moschino's WeChat Official Account to capture indirect user behavior data via Marketing Automation (see Solution 3)
- Encourage engagement with sales associates' WeCom (i.e., to receive exclusive wallpaper)
Solution 3: Marketing Automation & Social CRM – Achieve Data Ownership and Consolidation
In addition to using WeCom Moments for promoting marketing and PR content that was struggling to gain exposure, ITC helped Moschino develop a Martech strategy leveraging Marketing Automation and Social CRM (sCRM) tools and worked hand-in-hand with the brand’s partner Marketing agencies to supercharge the reach of Moschino's social channels.
During the brand ambassador launching campaign in July 2023, Moschino designed a dedicated Welcome Journey during the period with special template messages as well as announcement Official Account (OA) articles. The impact was phenomenal, with:
- 1,000+ new followers triggering the WeChat OA Welcome Journey
- Hundreds of fans received the exclusive Esther Yu wallpaper through the OA auto-replies
- Almost 100% of OA followers received template messages about the wallpaper campaign
- Tens of thousands of impressions for the OA article with an 11% click-through rate, many of whom found the post via the Official Account's push, friends' sharing, and Moments
- 5 Moschino stores obtained new clients through the wallpaper receiving journey
Social CRM also served as the conveyor belt that consolidated various scattered digital assets, including coupon and loyalty data, direct data from WeCom input by sales associates, and user behaviors on the WeChat Official Account. This consolidation led to the creation of holistic customer profiles, enabling precise audience targeting and enhanced service delivery.
By activating sCRM and Marketing Automation, Moschino effectively transferred and captured the existing follower base and newcomers. The WeChat Official Account's welcome journey also seamlessly directed traffic to WeCom and the loyalty Mini Program.
Since its rollout in 2022, tens of thousands of past and new followers have been onboarded, contributing to the creation of a data pool 100% owned by Moschino.
ITC x Moschino: Future Prospects
The initiatives undertaken during this digital transformation have had a significant impact, setting the stage for considerations in Moschino's 2024-2025 plan and future endeavors.
The partnership between ITC and Moschino is poised to extend beyond China and existing digital channels, encompassing upcoming initiatives to establish a genuine omnichannel data flow.
"It was very pleasant to work with ITC team regarding Moschino’s Digital Transformation project. Across the entire project team, everyone has a professional attitude and is equipped with extensive know-how in each field. Thanks for building the Moschino project from scratch. Kudos to the team."
