Faherty Case Study
Faherty is a family-run lifestyle and apparel brand dedicated to lessening environmental harm and helping consumers become better stewards of the planet. Founded in 2013, Faherty’s high-quality, sustainably-minded clothing is sold directly online and in stores, as well as through leading retailers including Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom.
HIGHLIGHTS
01
30% decrease in over-assortment
30% decrease in over-assortment
02
Maximize key account sell-in
Maximize key account sell-in
03
2x improvement in average weekly sell-through
2x improvement in average weekly sell-through
The Challenge
Despite its recognizable name and notable success, Faherty is just eight years old. As a young brand, most of the company’s merchandising decisions were based on founder intuition and factory minimums. While the team often consulted historical sales information, they knew they needed real-time consumer data to effectively evaluate newness, improve margins, and maintain – or preferably – accelerate their rapid growth trajectory.
The Solution
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Evaluate Newness
Rather than depending solely on gut instincts and opinions, Faherty relies on MakerSights to tap into and analyze consumer sentiment when evaluating which styles and product details to introduce. Target audiences can rate CAD drawings of men’s shirt patterns and colorways, as well as provide free-form commentary. The brand also conducts bucket and head-to-head analyses within MakerSights to determine design details, like pocket, belt loop, and logo placement, to name a few. This comprehensive consumer feedback gives the team the confidence they need to make investments that they know will pay off with consumers, driving not only sales but customer loyalty as well.
SKU Rationalization
Faherty leverages MakerSights to help balance assortments and decide which styles to adopt and drop each season. Interactive consumer sentiment visualizations and demand analytics enable the team to quickly and objectively identify hero styles and cut the long tail, effectively preventing cannibalization, maximizing the productivity of each SKU, and enabling them to drive more sales with fewer products.
Improve Retailer Confidence
Faherty also uses MakerSights to create custom audience segments that shop at their retail partners’ stores, like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. After testing seasonal assortments and gauging product sentiment among these consumers, the sales team leverages this data to maximize sell-in and secure shelf space during meetings with wholesale partners.
The Results
MakerSights helped the team overcome many of its growing pains, enabling Faherty to balance creative innovation and design with healthy, scalable growth. Faherty’s assortments typically start with around 300 items. Prior to MakerSights, the team would bring nearly all of the new products to market because there was no way for them to know which styles were resonating with target consumers, which were not, and which products would compete for the same buyers, cannibalizing sales. This led to milestone meetings that were often emotionally charged and inefficient.Today, milestone meetings are now focused, objective discussions with consumer data guiding the agenda and informing decisions.
With MakerSights, the team confidently cuts between 50 to 100 items from each assortment and is able to easily right-size investment depths by channel. As a result, Faherty has doubled its average weekly sell-through rate, which minimizes markdowns, boosts brand integrity, and ultimately contributes to their mission of reducing waste. This has enabled the brand to continue its remarkable trajectory and become the highly successful brand we know and love today.
“We are now able to create, tweak, adopt, and drop styles based on what we know consumers want, versus what we think they want,” says Caitlin. “MakerSights enables us to take more calculated creative risks, and we’ve seen considerable growth from making consumer-led decisions, like adding belt loops to some of our men’s shorts and decreasing the length of men’s shorts.”
“I feel much more confident going into milestone meetings armed with MakerSights’ Voice of the Consumer data. The insights it provides enable me to objectively validate costly and impactful merchandising decisions. MakerSights helps me sleep at night.”
Caitlin McGilvery, Director of Merchandising, Faherty
