Upstart women’s intimates company Adore Me has made great strides since it launched in March 2012, reinventing the fashion space while attracting considerable brand loyalty. Its revenue was nearly $84 million in 2016 and the company has more than 120 employees.
Technology plays a supremely vital role in the company and among its key customers.
“Unlike traditional fashion retailers, Adore Me has a strong online DNA and 75 percent of its shoppers are millennial women,” Nicolas Capuono, Vice President Customer Engagement for Adore Me, explained to Loyalty360. “Being a tech-savvy e-commerce company is a priority at Adore Me. Half of the team is devoted to UX and IT. Adore Me was one of the first retailers to use Google’s innovative Angular technology on its website, the most responsive technology on the market; and with a cutting-edge mobile app, 80 percent of Adore Me’s shopper traffic comes in from mobile.”
For consumer communications, Adore Me uses AI technology to automate its customer marketing efforts, Capuono noted.
“This makes it easy to segment and target customers based on any type of attributes, which enables us to be hyper-personalized in our customer messaging,” he said.
Two months ago, Adore Me was one of the first companies in the world to offer customer support through Facebook chat.
“The innovation is groundbreaking in customer experience within the world of e-commerce,” Capuono said. “It will allow all customers to chat directly with the company through the Facebook chat on AdoreMe.com. Moreover, following the disruptive and innovative DNA of Adore Me, the company recently implemented a hybrid-bot on its website. The hybrid-bot enables Adore Me customers to receive live support via messaging platforms.”
Adore Me is reinventing the fashion space and disrupting the highly traditional $24 billion lingerie industry, Capuono noted.
“With notable intimates retailers launching three to four collections a year, offering expensive designs, and making it impossible for women over a size 10 to shop for a bra outside a specialty store, Adore Me is changing the rules of the game,” he explained. “Adore Me is designing fast-fashion intimates, launching a new collection of 40-60 designs every single month (some have dubbed us the Zara of lingerie); offering radical prices of $39.95 for a set of bra and panty–less than half the price of our competitors; and offers our designs in sizes 30A-46I–being one of the only retailers to offer affordable, fashionable designs ranging from petite to plus. Adore Me’s fashionable appeal has been noticed by the industry, with its designs featured in Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and many others, and the brand was selected to sell at Nordstrom and Lord and Taylor.”
Morgan Hermand-Waiche, Founder and CEO of Adore Me, had no previous experience in lingerie, but he was determined to go against all odds and disrupt the lingerie industry.
“The idea of Adore Me was born while Morgan was studying his MBA at Harvard Business School, looking to gift lingerie to his girlfriend as an anniversary present,” Capuono explained. “To his surprise, he couldn’t find anything well designed on his tight, student budget. This led him to do some research, indicating that the lingerie industry was a $24 billion market, monopolized by one player with 40 to 60 percent market share, leading prices up, quality down, and neglecting many customers along the way. Morgan decided to start Adore Me then and there, with his professors as his first investors. Morgan was determined to revolutionize the lingerie industry with the innovative vision that every woman, no matter her dress size, deserves high quality lingerie that won’t break the bank.”