Making it personal

Stewart Ebrat, CIO, Vera Wang, on the role of modern networking in navigating headwinds while transforming the haute fashion retail brand.

While every retailer scrambled to adjust quickly enough to stay in business during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, luxury brands were even more challenged because our customer relationships depend upon exceptionally high-touch personal interactions and premier purchasing experiences. Both are difficult to deliver online, or via a mobile app, with a virtual shopping cart.

In our case, we were monumentally fortunate that our strategic Digital Transformation, which is still ongoing, began just prior to pandemic. This gave us tools and technologies that we credit with seeing us through.

From the outset, our vision centered around our capability to provide a highly personalized haute fashion retail experience from a store’s threshold through the sale. It included leveraging mobile devices, an employee app and location-aware infrastructure that would detect a customer as they entered one of our six flagship stores and send detailed information about that individual directly to their dedicated sales associate.

The information provided to the associate would include guest amenity preferences (lighting, music, refreshments) as a starting point. The data would continue to flow into the app as our infrastructure detected guest movements and dwell locations, allowing associates to continue personalizing the experience by making location-related suggestions on-the-fly.

Further, our transformation would also modernize our administrative, facilities and IT operations by adopting solutions for automating tasks that would make us all more productive.

To realize our vision, we determined a wired and wireless network refresh was critical. Working with our technology integration partner, Insight, we determined that HPE Aruba Networking offered the best combination of innovations, automation and ease of use.

The end-to-end solution we selected included the latest location-aware access points (APs) for Wi-Fi and high-speed multi-gigabit switches for our wired LAN along with industry-leading administration and security tools for unifying and managing wired and wireless.

This included AI-powered, cloud-based management along with policy-based network access control (NAC) to secure access for users, devices and IoT. The solution also furnished a robust tool for app creation, deployment and evolution that would leverage data supplied by our location-aware APs.

A significant benefit for a lean IT team like ours is the automation inherent in the network management solution we adopted. This ranges from remotely applying configurations and automatically applying updates to assigning devices to the proper switch ports on-the-fly, rather than requiring tedious manual tasks.

In addition, the AI-enabled network management tools not only help us quickly troubleshoot root causes of problems, but also provides us with data and analytics for proactively identifying issues before they impact users.

Although we had yet to deploy our employee app, by the pandemic’s onset we had the balance of our modernized networking infrastructure in place. This enabled us to rapidly pivot by accelerating cloud-based application migration, which included Microsoft Teams and a virtual showroom solution that enabled brides to visualize what a gown would look like on them.

By combining live video interactions, the virtual showroom and other cloud applications like virtual desktops, we were able to very closely replicate the in-store experience, including sending champagne, charcuterie or other refreshments based on using data to generate customer insights.

Our associates could show brides their gowns and conduct virtual fittings remotely, which kept customers connected with us and enabled them to make critical decisions confidently. Although many weddings were postponed, brides could continue planning – for which they were grateful.

Beyond carrying the video and virtual showroom streams, our network infrastructure ensured the communications were crystal clear. This was critical to creating a virtual experience that was as similar as possible to what our customers expect in our stores.

As the pandemic continued, we gained confidence and competencies with optimizing infrastructure and security, while also evolving to add software-defined, centrally managed WAN (SD-WAN) from HPE Aruba Networking for improving the connectivity between our locations.

In addition to significantly enhancing video, voice and application performance, the SD-WAN enabled us to take advantage of more flexible, simplified and cost-effective telecommunications connections. Equally critical were the security features built into our SD-WAN, giving us a foundation for taking a Zero Trust security approach.

Our SD-WAN also furthers our goals for increasing customer engagement by using our infrastructure to enhance the customer identification and personalization initiative we began envisioning pre-pandemic.

Moving ahead, we’ll continue migrating to cloud platforms and applications, such as Microsoft Azure and a more advanced virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. This is also leading us to evaluate adopting a cloud-delivered, subscription-based network-as-a-service (NaaS) model. It would provide us with the same wired, wireless and SD-WAN infrastructure, as well as the management and security tools we have now – but shift the burden for maintenance, updating and modernizing to the vendor.

Post-pandemic, our high-performance infrastructure is helping us meet new customer and employee expectations. For example, we’ll continue offering hybrid work options, as appropriate to the job. We’ll also continue our virtual options for brides that elect to interact with us electronically or as a hybrid experience.

Additionally, we’re implementing other ingenious new options that we can leverage for on-site and virtual interactions. These will include various digital technologies that we’ll be incorporating into our corporate headquarters, where we welcome brides, buyers, business partners, suppliers and other guests.

Bottom line, our pandemic takeaway is the power of modern technologies for enhancing how we interact with our communities, as well as their ability to make us better retailers.

Equally important was learning the value of working with a networking vendor that treats us like family – tying their success to our success at every step and providing us with advice, expertise and resources for turning our visions into reality.

In short, our company is grateful for our HPE Aruba Networking partnership, which helped us navigate the pandemic successfully and arrive in the post-pandemic world ready to take innovation into the future. It’s an exciting time to be a luxury brand and we look forward to the all the possibilities ahead.