Whitney Cathcart of 3DLOOK: How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More

An Interview With Orlando Zayas

…You need to use technology to create personalized experiences, ultimately enabling your brand to stand out. That means going to a website and having to do less search, knowing that the website is actually making recommendations to you of things that will be relevant to you, or spending less time figuring out what size to get, and so on. We have such an opportunity these days to buy so much because there are so many brands out there now. Anybody can build a brand overnight on Instagram, so from a consumer perspective, we have so much choice, so it’s really important to stand out, and that’s where the technology comes in handy and gives brands the ability to offer outstanding customer experience.

As part of my series about the “How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitney Cathcart.

Whitney Cathcart is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of 3DLOOK, the creator of the world’s leading patented mobile body scanning technology that drives retail innovation. She has more than two decades of executive leadership experience at some of America’s leading branded apparel, celebrity licensing and private-label manufacturing companies. Whitney previously led executive level merchandising, business development, and sales efforts for several major fashion and apparel companies.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I have been on the business side of fashion and retail from day one of my career, and have explored every aspect of this industry. I spent almost 30 years in sales, merchandising and production and understood that the industry’s future would be built on digital technologies leading to more efficient processes and better customer experiences. I knew that I wanted to be part of a company that was driving this evolution, and that’s when I decided to leave the product side of fashion and move to technology.

The next few years were spent doing a deep dive into AI and 3D technologies. I also gained a proper understanding of the implication of these technologies in the apparel industry in general, while assessing the industry’s future and where I thought it was heading in terms of manufacturing and customer experience.

I also spent a lot of time talking to early-stage technology founders in the apparel ecosystem. I learned all that I could about 3D design, fit technology and automation. I explored robotics, computer vision technologies and other emerging 3D technologies in the immersive space.

That led me to 3DLOOK, which is now a leading provider of personalized fit and size recommendations and virtual try-on for shoppers to help brands reduce returns while increasing conversion and AOV. We enable forward-thinking companies to provide a superior customer experience, enhance business processes and shift to more sustainable business models while boosting long-term customer loyalty.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

There was a time before there was a thing called the internet, when we still had fax machines, and we did everything manually. At one of my first jobs, I had to manually plan fabric purchases for luxury companies. For instance, if we were making suits for a luxury brand, I would make predictions on how much fabric to buy, and those predictions would go over to the production teams. They would purchase that fabric, and then they would use it to produce men’s suits. As you can imagine, these were very, very expensive. It was a luxury. I had these huge books, the size of the desk, and everything was done in pencil. You would add up everything manually, that’s how archaic it was. One day I added an extra zero. As a result of this mistake, we overbought fabric that cost many tens of thousands of dollars.

To this day, I remember that incident, and it’s one of the things that drives me to always pay attention to every detail. It wasn’t exactly fun when it happened, but it’s something that I’ve taken with me, as I consistently tell my teams, “The devil is in the details.” I can look back and laugh now, but it was a significant problem when it happened.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Of course, there have been many people who have helped me along the way, particularly one very successful founder who really drove a lot of the work ethic that I have with me today.

Again, these were pre-internet days. At the end of the week, the teams would have to produce and edit bullet-pointed recaps of the week so he could evaluate how the work we were doing was driving our growth. These “bulletins” had to be written in a specific format on a particular lined paper with a specific black ballpoint pen. On Friday nights at precisely five o’clock, we were called into his office to submit our bulletin, and he would sit down with a red pen, and ink it up. I don’t think anybody ever got out of there without it being covered in red, and as a result, most of us ended up spending Friday nights in the office!

This process taught me how to write something meaningful and in 5–10 words. To this day, this skill has helped me a lot, especially when creating pitch decks, presenting products to our clients or investors, or communicating feedback to the team. It taught me how to formulate my thoughts very clearly and precisely. It was bullet-pointed, the most important words to be able to recap. In many ways, it was an early version of OKRs.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I love The Anatomy of Peace, which at the end of the day, from a high level, is a book about empathetic leadership, and how important it is to step into other people’s shoes, to be able to look at the situation. It was a great book, and it taught me a lot. Shortly after I read it, Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft and wrote a book called Hit Refresh. He grew up in India and had all sorts of things that he had to deal with in his life. The way he’s transformed Microsoft is really around empathetic thinking and empathetic leadership ideas for changing corporate culture and such. Those two books go hand in hand, and they both spoke to me.

If someone asked me who I most want to have at a dinner party, it would be, hands down, Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and a thought leader in many different areas. He’s one of the funniest, wittiest human beings and innovative thinkers. I have seen him speak live, read his books, and listened to his podcast. He was very early on into predictions for e-commerce and digital strategies, so I would recommend him as a go-to podcaster, especially for entrepreneurs and leaders in the retail and technology sectors.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

The diversity of the founding team is among the things that helped our company rapidly grow and achieve great success. There’s four of us: 3DLOOK’s CEO Vadim Rogovskiy is a serial entrepreneur with prior exit experience and a background in mobile tech and software; CPO Alex Arapov is an expert engineering leader; Chief Scientific Officer Ivan Makeev holds a PhD in computational and applied math and spent almost a decade as a research scientist at Intel Labs, and as a CSO, I bring nearly three decades of expertise in apparel manufacturing and retail which help bring the intersection of fashion and technology together.

We are entirely different people with four really unique skill sets that don’t overlap. Each brings an outstanding contribution: business, product, deep science, and tech. The diversity in a team is significant because if you’ve got three or four founders and they’re all experts in one field, you risk thinking the same way. In the case of 3DLOOK, our diversity filters down throughout the company since each of us look for different skill sets and qualities in our team. This enables us as a company to really bring different perspectives that drive innovation and growth.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

It all goes back to the basics that we don’t do enough. First of all, take time for yourself. It could be as simple as enjoying some time in a hot bath. Exercise is important as well, and helps the body and mind cope with stress and anxiety; it also gives you the time and opportunity to clear your mind — a meditation of some sort. The reality, however, is that burnout in entrepreneurship is just a part of the journey, so if you can’t handle burnout, probably entrepreneurship isn’t going to be the right decision for a person. It’s really about how you handle the pressure. But at the end of the day, if somebody asked me what I would do, I’d say, make sure you eat well, sleep well, work out and take time for yourself.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. The Pandemic only made things much worse for retailers in general. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?

Retail had been suffering long before COVID, and the pandemic only accelerated that suffering for retailers who had not already embraced digital transformation. On the other hand, many retailers have thrived, mainly e-commerce and brands that have embraced technology and also had an amazing authentic engagement with their customers. If you look back over the last decade, there was just a prolonged evolution from a retail perspective, particularly legacy retailers who perhaps had a hierarchy of leadership that was not innovative enough and not peeking around corners. Ten, twelve years ago, e-commerce was still very nascent, and few believed in the emergence of digital brands and e-commerce at scale, and that people would buy things online, particularly clothing. Later on, it became clear that if you’re not willing to take chances and experiment with innovations and innovative technologies, you missed the boat, and that’s a large part of what happened over the last ten years. The fact is that we were also just over-stored in general, a generation of over consumption.

Today, even without COVID, you have a generation who cares about different things, such as responsible consumption, the better quality of products, and less harm to the planet. You had COVID on top of it as we were all living in sweatpants and t-shirts, and all things combined created an understanding that maybe we need less of the better things, and we don’t need all the things that we were purchasing. COVID was just a culmination of all these things that were already happening and transforming retail, so if you had retail leadership that was not adapting to these transformations and leaning into technology, you were going to have a problem.

Brands and retailers who have survived and are now thriving have been able to maintain their success because they were not afraid to invest in new innovative customer-centric approaches, and that’s something for anyone thinking about brand and commerce should keep in mind.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

I think there are three things.

Number one is authentic relationships with consumers. Many of these brands are Chinese brands that pop up on Instagram daily, but what they have in common is accurate messaging, and they’re talking about things that feel authentic to consumers. For many decades we used to see brands tapping Hollywood talent or supermodels, which isn’t as authentic as what you see going on today, where social media influencers are often not just famous people, they’re just people that happen to love the brand, their everyday consumers. Having an authentic relationship with your customer and your audience is critical. Brands that are doing that well seem to have higher engagement levels. For example, 1822 Denim, an NYC denim brand, is just a great example of that. They have such a high engagement rate because they believe in their core, and they communicate their mission to create perfectly fitting clothes for women of all shapes and sizes and embrace diversity. They’re a mission-driven company, and you see it in all of their channels of distribution.

The other piece of it that’s really important is how brands are using technology to create more personalized experiences, from personalized size and fit recommendations, or virtual try-on (and this is something that we do at 3DLOOK) to product recommendation and even those experiences where consumers don’t know there’s technology behind it, they just feel that the approach they’re getting is much more personalized.

Last but not least, pricing and value always comes to play. At the end of the day, consumers have so many choices on places to purchase that it’s vital for brands to make them feel like they’re being treated well and there is value in the products and experience.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a retail business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

When I think about the e-commerce brands that I’ve worked with in the past, one trend that I see is MBA graduates working on DTC brands thinking that with their background, they can nail it. The reality is that the people who don’t come out of the industry take for granted and miscalculate the complexity of producing apparel at scale. You can be smart, but the process of building a brand and actually producing those garments is super, super complex. There are lots of brands where you have CEOs and executives who are amazing marketers or engineers. But the reality is that production, even today, is still very complex and difficult. Technology and automation is making a difference, but the transformation is still nascent.

My advice to each entrepreneur eager to build a brand is to team up with a co-founder or an executive that actually comes out of fashion and make sure that you are surrounded by competent people that don’t excel in the same thing that you excel in. And this advice is applicable in any sector. If you go back to 3DLOOK’s founding team, that diversification has enabled us to do things faster because we’ve got expertise on both the technology side as well as the fashion and retail side.

This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business in general and for retail in particular?

The only thing that matters is the customer. If you cannot provide customers with a great customer experience and excellent customer service, you will not get repeat customers. I’ll share a story that’s not related to fashion but captures the essence of superior customer experience.

I was recently at a dinner at a nice restaurant, and a person next to me ordered a cocktail and was not happy with how that cocktail tasted. Within seconds, the waiter realized that the person sitting next to me didn’t like his drink. He came over to our table, took the glass away, and said, Sir, what can I do to make you a better cocktail that you would like? That right there changed the entire experience of the night. That was the most impeccable, incredible customer experience, and for that reason alone, you would go back.

Customer experience and being consumer-centric should be in the company’s DNA. In retail and e-commerce, having things like a chatbot or an assistant that feels like you’re talking to a human is important, because the worst thing is for consumers to have a bad brand experience and feel as though they can’t get in touch with the brand. Nothing turns a consumer off more than that. To have a great brand experience and to be a successful retailer, your customers have to be at the forefront of your strategy.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

First of all, excellent customer experience should be the DNA of a company. If top management doesn’t care, it will be hard to filter down through the culture. If you’re building a brand, customer experience should be part of it, otherwise, it’ll trickle down, and your customers will feel it, whether they’re shopping online or at the store or even interacting with the brand in social media. If you’ve got a significant social media following but not engaging with the shoppers trying to talk to you, that’s a terrible brand experience because you’re not focused on your customer.

I see brands that are trying to use technology, but they haven’t entirely done it well. Again, chatbots are a great example. There are certain brands where you can’t get a hold of anybody because they’re trying to cut operational costs and use chatbots that are fully automated and therefore can’t answer many of the questions you have.

If a customer has some sort of a problem, whether in shipping or transaction, or anything else, and they don’t feel that their problem is heard and addressed immediately, it’s a terrible brand experience. I see this on certain e-commerce websites where they’ve got the technology there, but it’s not being used in the right way, and it creates a worse brand experience.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

1822 Denim implemented 3DLOOK’s YourFit solution to offer personalized size recommendations to their shoppers. From a PDP on the website, the shopper clicks on a sizing widget and is voice-guided through a quick capture process using their smartphone camera. Then, in under 30 seconds, they receive a size and fit recommendation. When the brand surveyed their customers, they found that 92% felt confident that the fit recommendation was personalized to their unique body shape and measurements. We were super excited by that because, additionally, we saw in the data that they were actually purchasing more and returning less because they really felt like that size recommendation was personalized to their own body.

The core of the product we wanted to build was to make sure that the customer felt that the experience they were getting with 3DLOOK’s solution was tailored to their unique body shape, so to hear that back from the brand was really delightful for us at 3DLOOK.

Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

Definitely, we track results daily and see that the brand has seen 4x the conversion rates combined with a 30% decrease in return rates. Additionally, the results have shown a 23% boost in AOV since launching with 3DLOOK in 2019. 70% of customers who use the widget went on to purchase something on the website.

A fantastic retail experience isn’t just one specific thing. It can be a composite of many different subtle elements fused together. Can you help us break down and identify the different ingredients that come together to create a “fantastic retail experience”?

Again, customer service is really important. Without it, you’re never going to get repeat customers.

Engaging in-store experiences, like for instance, the opening a bar in the women’s shoe department, ensures that the consumer has more fun and spends more time in the store.

Problem-solving, too. A customer always wants to know that you can really serve them and solve their problems, whether it’s with billing, sizing, helping better understand how a particular thing is going to fit, and so on. I’ve had amazing experiences with a particular e-commerce company that jumped through hoops to get me a specific dress the same day before I was about to leave for vacation. I think having customer service that really does jump through hoops can move the needle to ensure a repeat customer and increased purchasing.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.

A brand with a mission. As mentioned above, 1822 Denim is a perfect example of a mission-driven company. Each of their communication channels tells the same story of the importance of diversity, as they create perfectly fitting jeans for women of all shapes and sizes, which is really authentic, and why their engagement rates are so high. If you look broadly across the spectrum of successful brands today, I think you will see a pattern there that mission-driven brands, whether it’s sustainability, inclusivity, a better world etc., are doing way better because they’re authentic. Consumers can relate to their values.

Then, you need to use technology to create personalized experiences, ultimately enabling your brand to stand out. That means going to a website and having to do less search, knowing that the website is actually making recommendations to you of things that will be relevant to you, or spending less time figuring out what size to get, and so on. We have such an opportunity these days to buy so much because there are so many brands out there now. Anybody can build a brand overnight on Instagram, so from a consumer perspective, we have so much choice, so it’s really important to stand out, and that’s where the technology comes in handy and gives brands the ability to offer outstanding customer experience.

Then, the most important thing is your customer — plain and simple. Everything starts and ends with the customer. Brands with this mindset have been super successful, and brands that have not done a great job simply don’t make it. If you look at some of those big, fabulous legacy brands that have been around for 20, 30, 40 years that are no longer around today, they missed using technology to drive better customer experience. They were not consumer-focused. They did not deliver a great customer experience in-store or online. They did not deliver great customer service. Those brands are out of business. So if you want to be a successful brand, you need to be customer-centric right out of the gate, being authentic and customer-focused.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could do anything, it would be to build a virtual goods platform. It’s better for the planet and drives creativity. Luckily, there are companies already doing it. If we purchased some of the clothing that we buy and wear only once in a digital world, we would help drive down waste, and engage with products and our own creative identities in different ways. It’s the future actually, and already there are billions of dollars being traded and bought in digital goods. It’s something that really excites me.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Definitely, let’s keep in touch on LinkedIn!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

About The Interviewer: Orlando Zayas is the CEO of Katapult, an award-winning omnichannel payment platform. Zayas is known for his revenue growth strategies and visionary leadership in the eCommerce and retail space. His future-forward expertise has led companies such as GE Capital, Safe-Guard Products International, and DRB Capital. Zayas is also highly committed to providing educational opportunities to underprivileged communities through his philanthropic endeavors. Zayas’ business insights are regularly featured in publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Retail Insights, and more.