How Jaeger-LeCoultre introduced a new digital in-store experience through mobile apps
The luxury industry is quickly adapting to its customers’ evolving digital habits through a set of tools such as social media, e-commerce, in-store events but also more and more through mobile apps.
Marc Montagne, Digital Coordinator at Jaeger-LeCoultre explains how his team understood that mobile apps will become a real asset to meet their clients’ expectations.
Could you tell us a little bit more about your role at Jaeger-LeCoultre?
As part of the Digital team of Jaeger-LeCoultre I am working on most projects related to digital, especially the e-commerce website, mobile apps and digital animations in boutiques or events. I also work on email marketing and SEO. At the moment my work is particularly focused on a B2B mobile application where we tend to have a significant number of smartphones and tablets to onboard.
What’s the goal of this new mobile app?
Our latest app has different objectives: showcase our customization offer for our customer, provide an enhanced in-store experience or initiate a hyper personalized relationship with our end customer. For example, we launched the app “Atelier Reverso” for our watch Reverso. This watch is one of our iconic products since it was created 85 years ago: it’s a rectangular shaped watch that has the feature to turn on itself and thus reveal a second watch dial.
To mark the 85th anniversary of this watch, we launched a new concept called “Atelier Reverso” that would allow customers to fully customize their watch. Customers get the chance to take part in the creation of their own Reverso by choosing the design of their watch and personalizing it. They can change the material or shade of the strap, decide on an engraved design for the reverse of the watch. A wide range of options ensures everyone can create their own unique watch face.
We decided to make this personalization step interactive by creating an app. For us at Jaeger-LeCoultre, we believe it’s a great way to personalize a watch as it’s more interactive and enjoyable than a paper catalog for instance. The experience is radically different when the customer can directly touch the material, scroll through the different types of bracelets. It becomes much easier to imagine your watch like this rather than looking at a website. The customer can even send its creation to himself by email afterwards. The “Atelier Reverso” app responds to a business-oriented goal by allowing us to put forward our customization offer and potentially generate sales afterwards.
Of course, we also have other apps whose goal is rather to showcase our products and/or provide a high level of service to our customers such as the Geophysic iPad app or the Moon Phase App. The latter was created to help adjust one’s watch to the current moon phase.
This app was made for your customers and thus is available on the Apple App Store. However this app is also distributed in physical stores, can you explain how you optimized its distribution?
Originally we had not planned to deploy the “Atelier Reverso” app within our stores. This app was launched at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva. We had a large touchscreen table to be able to see watches in great details but obviously we could not have a large number of digital tables on the booth. Therefore, we decided to deploy the app on iPads as it’s much more convenient to pass an iPad from hand to hand.
However we wanted to get rid of the constraints of the Apple Store to be able to deploy and update our app quickly if needed. We couldn’t wait for approvals to be able to deploy our app to our iPads. Appaloosa came in as the most suitable solution to our problem. This setup was so successful during the fair that we started to think about deploying our app within our stores. Once again we chose to use Appaloosa as we could instantly deploy our app to iPads and measure its success with our customers very quickly.
Is it usual for your team to follow such a process when launching a new app?
No, this is the first time we have had this type of process. It is even quite unusual since we started with an app that was meant to be deployed only during a few days for journalists and professionals. The success encouraged us to deploy it within our stores and to the public.
Would you say such mobile app allows not only your sales team to offer a hyper personalized in-store experience to your customers but also make sure your brand is aligned with your customers’ evolving digital habits?
Yes for sure. We indeed realized that our customers are looking for more personalization when buying one of our products. By offering an app such as “Atelier Reverso” it becomes also possible to revisit our iconic product and offer something different more often. For example, we established a partnership with Christian Louboutin, who designed some dials and straps for our women collection. The app is particularly suited to easily offer this type of collaboration to our potential customers. With Appaloosa, we could instantly deploy this app to nearly a hundred devices within our stores worldwide.
Your iPads are equipped with a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution, how did you handle the joint deployment with our Mobile Application Management solution (MAM)?
As part of the Richemont Group which is a large group, there is of course a need for an IT layer at the corporate level. The MDM solution is managed by the IT team and in our case, it wasn’t agile enough. Our projects are customer-oriented, we work in eleven different languages therefore we need to be agile to quickly respond to any issue without having to manage additional steps and constraints that would be a waste of time for our business. We need to deploy our apps very quickly on multiple devices and be able to update them instantly. With a mobile application management solution such as Appaloosa, we are able to be fully independent and innovate for our customers, which is crucial for us.
If you’d like to know more about the Watch Reverso, you can read all the story here and you can download the app “Atelier Reverso” on the Apple Store here.
Thank you Marc for taking the time to share your story. If you’d like to read more stories like this one, please click the heart below!
