John Lewis & Partners

Re-Inventing womenswear at John Lewis & Partners through innovation and service

2018 was a pivotal year for Women’s Fashion at John Lewis & Partners as we set an ambitious target for growth – become a £0.5bn fashion brand by 2021.

To begin this journey, we took a holistic view of our womenswear offer and end-to-end customer service proposition and made a conscious decision to improve it. After delving into customer insight and looking at the changing market, we realised that we needed to be brave and boldly enact change.

Our objectives were to:

• Reinvent our proposition to chime with the changing demands of our
  audience – re-imagine the role of the “John Lewis label”.
• Establish our position as a thought leader and credible fashion player
• Rapidly grow sales and market share.

As a result, we boldly reinvented our offering with the launch of our most
stylish womenswear collection to date. The reinvention was brought to life throughout the customer experience with a series of innovations, such as an online messaging service to develop relationships with customers and a series of ‘style studios’. Everything was enhanced by the launch of personal styling in stores led by our Partners as part of #WeArePartners initiative. This helped establish John Lewis & Partners as a credible fashion player, which was evidenced by unprecedented coverage in credible fashion titles such as Grazia, Stylist as well as the Evening Standard. As one headline playfully stated, John Lewis was now “never knowingly underdressed”.

We saw uplifts in NPS, engagement on social channels, customer reviews of products, personal styling appointments (up 34% YOY), with sales up 24% YOY post-launch and a 13% uplift in new customers vs. last year. But most importantly, John Lewis & Partners Womenswear and Accessories sales were up +7% YOY – that’s an incremental £2.1m in sales.