ARMONK, N.Y. and LONDON, Feb. 27, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced its collaboration with LabelSneak, a small online retailer of discounted designer men's wear, which is using IBM Smarter Commerce technologies to create a unique shopping experience aimed at the millennial consumer.  As a result, LabelSneak has seen 148 percent growth in revenue, tripling sales in less than one year.

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LabelSneak is an outlet store aimed at brand aware guys offering discounts of up to 75 percent on fashion and sportswear, alerting consumers via social channels to personalized, limited-time sales offers. With new deals regularly updated, the site generates tremendous amounts of data such as tweets that include Instagram photos, Facebook comments on the most popular sale items and conversations between consumers on favorite brands through social channels, mobile and tablet devices.

The challenge for LabelSneak was to capture and glean insights from this big data to better understand what consumers were saying about the latest promotions, which items were the most popular and at what time and in what circumstances sales were most effective. LabelSneak also needed analytics to better target and mold online sales campaigns and to decide which social channels effectively communicated its message to attract new customers.

LabelSneak teamed with IBM and IBM Business Partner CSI Solution to connect with the growing marketplace of consumers who prefer to buy across online, mobile and social channels. With access to IBM Global Financing within minutes, the small retailer is now using IBM Smarter Commerce technology to handle high volumes of transactions as well as the large volumes and variety of data, CSI's RapidCommerce Cloud Managed Service Solution has helped LabelSneak create a site to more effectively target the digitally savvy millennial consumer with an integrated brand experience across all devices. To date, the platform is supporting a rapid pace of growth, enabling the client to focus its time and resources on growing the business such as conducting sales promotions, gleaning insights from Facebook comments or tweets.

Fashion companies of every size and style are vying for a slice of the men's wear market. To compete with more established retailer brands, LabelSneak needed to better understand men's online consumer behavior, create a more tailored marketing campaign and deliver the right merchandising mix. Not only is LabelSneak gleaning insights from data analyzing which brands to carry, but they also are seeing how consumer preferences for certain brands in men's wear are connected to a favorite sports teams or music.

IBM Smarter Commerce precision marketing is allowing consumers to choose which sales promotions they want to be alerted to or when their favorite clothing item goes on sale via text, tweet, Facebook post or email. This can be a more effective sales method as smaller retailers can deliver a level of personalization and a more tailored marketing campaign to the individual consumer.

"Understanding what resonates well with millennial consumers brings insight and impact into our ability to offer the right items and to create the right promotions at the right time, and enables us to break through to this challenging and influential millennial segment," says Ade Shannon, CEO of LabelSneak. "Social media is a consistent part of this segment's daily life and is a viable and valuable way to connect with them. The collaboration with IBM and CSI' RapidCommerce Solution is providing us the foundation to capture these insights, to anticipate consumer demand and to design a scalable platform as our business continues to grow."

IBM Smarter Commerce provides intelligent automation of marketing, sales, customer service and procurement to help chief marketing officers, chief procurement officers, sales, e-commerce, supply chain and customer service executives do their jobs more productively and efficiently.

Read the Smarter Planet Blog Post "Fashioning a Future in Online Retail with Big Data Analytics and Social Conversations" by Ade Shannon, CEO of LabelSneak.

For more information on LabelSneak, please go to www.labelsneak.com

For more information on CSI RapidCommerce Solution, please go to http://www.channelinsight.co.uk/Platform.html

CONTACT:

Kaveri Camire
IBM External Relations
1-914-625-6395

Lizette Kodama
IBM External Relations
1-646-675-0750

SOURCE IBM