Overview

Red Wing Shoes, founded in 1905, has a long-standing tradition of creating durable, comfortable footwear for demanding industries like mining, farming, and logging. The company now offers over 990 footwear styles, 590 workwear styles, and 390 accessory styles, available in over 110 countries. With more than 2,100 employees, 700+ retail stores, 2 tanneries, and 2 factories, Red Wing Shoes continues to innovate, combining fine leather with exceptional craftsmanship, and maintains a robust e-commerce platform. Their retail strategy focuses on exceptional customer service and expertise.

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

• Data Quality: multiple records existed for individual customers, making it difficult to know the customer history without manual intervention
• Data Visibility: with multiple systems housing duplicate records, there was no visibility into a single customer’s purchase history across store and e-commerce sites
• Data Management: difficult to drive good data management with multiple systems, locations, and departments without a central data hub
• Reporting & Analytics: impossible to analyze business metrics when data is messy and unorganized

The Solution

Red Wing Shoes embarked on a data journey to master their customer data across North America and Europe, aiming for a comprehensive view of their customers. One of the primary challenges was understanding customer expectations, preferences, and behaviors to market and service them effectively. With over 9 million individual records, we needed a tool to intelligently connect all transactions to the right customer. By leveraging Semarchy’s Unified Data platform, Red Wing's business units gained access to real-time, accurate data, empowering them to be proactive with marketing and customer support, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.

The results

By empowering our business units with a collaborative platform for data management and governance across the whole ecosystem and mastering most of the information across our global storefronts and e-commerce platform, Red Wing Shoes has achieved the following results:

• One True View of Customer: With a single, golden record, marketing and customer service can now see comprehensive data on a customer, helping them better market to and service them.
• Self-Serve Business Intelligence: Self-serve business intelligence for business decision-makers to now use data across the retail enterprise for multiple business use cases, enabling business leaders to drill into data, understand data relationships, and ask new questions to pursue sales growth.
• Better Customer Relationships: Red Wing Shoes can now build more meaningful relationships with customers as individuals, speaking to the right person about the right product at just the right moment, increasing brand awareness, and improving the customer experience with accurate, centralized information.
• Greater Efficiency: Eliminated operational data redundancy costs with a single data management process to update records and solve data quality issues in one platform.

Metrics

With our old systems, if you had a customer that bought shoes in 3 different stores and online, we would have 4 different records of you. You would look like 4 different $300 customers to us, instead of 1 $1,200 customer. With Semarchy, we solved our data quality and master data management issues with one system. Now our customer data contains a single golden record for everyone, making it easy for marketing, sales, and customer service to see the data in real-time. 

The Technology

Red Wing Shoes chose Semarchy for their flexibility, expertise, and unified data platform, along with a great cultural fit. Semarchy’s Unified Data Platform allowed us to configure business rules, enrich data, flag violations, and correct errors through an intuitive user experience with guided workflows. Their data discovery and lineage capabilities enabled us to load and create new consumer and product data.

Disruptive Factor

Red Wing Shoes faced challenges in understanding customer expectations, preferences, and behaviors to improve marketing and service. With over 9 million records, they needed a tool to connect transactions to the right customer, enabling targeted marketing based on engagement, purchase history, and location.

The disruptive factor for us was the supportive partnership with the Semarchy team – even during some difficult issues. Part of the selection process includes ensuring we pick a partner with a good culture. One that when the chips are down, they get into the fight with you and chalk up the incremental effort to good customer relations. Now that we have the right technology and the right data, we are planning additional projects for our commercial division. With one Golden Record – everyone wants this data.

Shining Moment

When starting a new Point of Sale project for our retail stores, the business leader asked early on, “...and we are going to be using the Golden Record, correct?” Our business leaders now understand the value of MDM and data quality, insisting on them for new projects. Previous projects provided a perfect foundation, needing only minor, incremental work. Without Semarchy, achieving a consolidated customer view would have taken much longer and exceeded the project budget.