Conversation with Jonathan Barachowitz, Accessories Product Manager
What attracted you about UQ?
UQ connects our business to the greater retail landscape and collectively we understood the value in these types of business insights. How we leverage and act on this information will always be a work in progress.
What is most helpful about the information?
Anytime you can visualize and quantify performance you’re going to have an easier go at making progress. We like that each of our team members has unmitigated access to their store and staff performance in real time across any time domain.
How frequently do you login and check the benchmarks?
At the macro level, we look at benchmarks (Team and Store Leaderboard) at least twice a week: always on Mondays to understand movement from prior weeks, and then again on Tuesdays amongst a smaller group to discuss insights and where to focus our energy
How are you using the benchmarks?
Presently, we lean on UQ for the key floor performance metrics, specifically average units, shoe-to-insole fitting ratio, shoe-to-sock fitting ratio, and email capture rate. This helps us compile key information across our brand and identify those areas of success and improvement.
How do you use the Brand Check-In?
Any tool that gives us greater visibility into our business is going to be appealing. The value in most vendor meetings hinges on our ability to efficiently (and simply) communicate the state of our business. Brand check-in is one tool we use in building that arsenal so we can get the most out of each and every engagement. Broadly, we are always trying to understand and evaluate the value a brand brings to our business. When we see things going well the question is “are we maximizing this opportunity?” and if we aren’t, the question becomes “what do we have to change to improve?” Brand check in is a great tool here.
What positive changes have happened in your store due to your access to this data?
As I mentioned, greater and easier access to key performance indicators in real time across broad time domains is a big win for the team. Change does not happen all at once and making metrics visible is only one part of reaching our goals. That said, UQ is helping make our business better through transparency and insights. It is on us to continue to use the information to make meaningful change.
