Forever 21

The challenge

Forever 21, Inc, is a specialty clothing and accessories retailer for women, men and children. It has a strong reputation making the hottest and most current fashion trends available to customers at great value. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and operates over 480 stores worldwide including its first UK store and ecommerce site, which opened in November 2010.

Opening its store at the famous Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham was the first step for Forever 21, in the fast moving and highly competitive UK fashion market. The next important milestone is launching in London’s Oxford Street, renowned for its high-street fashion. However, in retail today it is just as important to have strong presence online as well as these high profile flagship stores.

In April 2011, it was revealed in The Daily Telegraph that the market research company, Mintel had reported that £4.3 billion worth of clothes were bought over the Internet in 2010, a growth of 152 per cent in the last five years, with over a third of consumers having bough some of their clothes online in the past year. Such has been the explosion in demand for consuming fashion online; a new ecommerce site would be instrumental in establishing the Forever 21 brand in the UK.

With fierce competition just one a click away, the success of Forever 21’s new website hinged not only on offering the latest fashions at the right price, but also in making the online experience enjoyable and easy to buy from, for the savvy, stylish consumer.

The solution

A crucial part of the online purchasing process is making the final transaction at the checkout as simple and straightforward as possible, reducing the time it takes to complete the transaction. “We needed a software solution that could be fully integrated into our ecommerce site, to ensure every customer address is rapidly validated at the point of entry,” explains IT Associate Manager at Forever 21, Jae-Won Min. “Having this information correct is not only important to complete the transaction, it is vital to ensure the products are delivered on time and to the right address. It also ensures our customer database is populated with accurate and clean address information which we can use for future correspondence and marketing activities.”

Having considered a number of different options, Forever 21 selected Capscan and its web-based address management software – Matchcode Webnet. The fact that Capscan’s technology can be seamlessly integrated into any web page or browser-based application made Matchcode Webnet very appealing, especially given the tight development schedule Forever 21 was working with in order to launch the new website in November 2010.

Min explains: “One of the first challenges that we faced was understanding the different address formats in the UK. We specifically needed to find an address management company that could provide validation services for both UK and EU and Capscan demonstrated very strong capabilities in this field.”

Today, when a customer visits Forever 21’s website and has finished filling their shopping basket they navigate to the checkout and sign-in if they are an existing customer, or register their details as a new customer. When prompted on the online form they simply enter a postcode or partial address and Matchcode Webnet instantly provides the customer with a drop down list of addresses associated with that postcode. Upon selection of the address the relevant field in the order form are populated with the customers full and correct postal address, which has been validated against the Royal Mail’s definitive PAF file of 28.2 million UK addresses.

The benefits

During the short implementation time Capscan and Forever 21 worked closely together to agree how the address information should be displayed on the customer’s screen and what fields of data needed to be captured.

“We were really impressed with the speed and accuracy at which the software returns all matching addresses when the customer enters their postcode,” states Min on what impresses him most about Matchcode Webnet. She concludes: “Capscan and Matchcode Webnet meets all our needs, wants and expectations and we would certainly recommend the company and its address management solutions to other retailers.”