Elevating and innovating luxury retail at Barneys New York

With Melvin Perez, VP of Technology for Barneys New York

Luxury retail has always been about serving each individual customer who walks through the door with a high-touch, utterly personalized experience. Now, with the rise of online shopping and a new generation of shoppers reared on technology, the bar has been raised.

For Barneys New York, technology lends itself to achieving this objective in new, exciting ways. The rise of practical AI is powering customized online recommendations and helping predict the trending desires of customers in real time. Employees on the ground in stores armed with tablets can instantly surface information to answer customer questions in the moment. Instead of removing the personal touch from retail, technology today is making it more experiential and high-touch across channels, so customers feel taken care of and employees are elevated to brand ambassadors.

As VP of Technology Operations for Barneys, Melvin Perez is on the frontline of this retail innovation. Perez is responsible for providing the tools to enable such high-touch luxury experiences. “Barneys New York takes pride in our ability to stand out from competitors by being more than a luxury retailer,” he says. “We see ourselves as a technology, entertainment, and hospitality company.” To this end, Perez’s IT budget is focused not on fixing legacy solutions but turning to new technologies that will create a whole new experience for customers and employees alike.

“In the past, you didn’t need technology to sell clothing. Now people walk into Barneys New York and expect an experience.”

— Melvin Perez, Vice President, Technology Operations, Barneys

A content platform for the digital workforce

The new generation of employees comes into Barneys with very little experience of working in a “desktop-centric” way. Like customers, they’re used to being agile and mobile, being able to pull up information on a device that will help them do their jobs in the moment. “Our IT department is always looking for solutions that are moving fast,” says Perez, “with industry top-players or niche solutions where they can be successful.” But for any company in a competitive market, protecting valuable intellectual property means having a handle on content governance.

Perez sought a unified content platform that would enable employees to be productive, allowing them to work in ways that feel most intuitive, but keep content absolutely protected as well. In the past, Barneys team members on the ground at Fashion Week in New York would have to bring their laptops and connect to a hub and VPN in to the network in order to review and approve documents. Having already adopted Office 365, they needed a content management solution that would help them quickly connect the dots in the flow of a fast-paced day, without having to worry about syncing files or botching version control.

Perez naturally looked at OneDrive, but as he says, “OneDrive is great, but we have too much data. It can’t sustain us.” Box became the natural option, providing the ability to scale up storage and make adoption intuitive. To use Box, users didn’t have to change the way they worked, because with one content platform, they could work across different suites, including both Office 365 and G Suite. They could even work on files offline, when internet connection at certain locations was unpredictable.

Box gave Barneys’ new generation of employees much more agility and mobility. Now, with Box as a content layer, they can hop on a iPad and use Office 365 in concert with Box, even from the frontlines of a fashion show. “The biggest takeaway from this product is our ability to collaborate and disconnect from the traditional workstation,” says Perez. “Box helps us excel in this area of business. Other competitors lack the speed and stability in their platform or are just too big to care about specific industries.”

Box has also become pivotal to Barneys’ onboarding process — a critical workflow, since turnover is naturally high in retail. “We’re at the point now where we’ve done a lot with Box,” Perez says, “including content management, sharing and workflows that rely on Box.” Today, Barneys uses Box like a mobile intranet for employees, with 22TB of data stored on the platform and the last, lingering Google Drive users being ported over this quarter. Every new employee who comes on board at Barneys gets a Box account right away. And Box has also worked well in terms of training and communication across stores country-wide. Now, store general managers can use Box as a hub of operations, with all training and policy materials easily accessible from any device.

“Box’s platform, features and continuous enhancements have enabled IT to deliver a product that has been deeply embedded in our employee’s daily workflow.”

— Melvin Perez, Vice President, Technology Operations, Barneys New York

Visually stunning images — and enormous image files

In luxury retail, rich, beautiful visuals are everything. From a detailed high-res large-format bus advertisement to the thousands of crisp product shots that populate the website, Barneys digital studio creates very large files, and lots of them. “They never look back, but just keep taking more and more pictures daily,” Perez says. Barneys was at the point where there were so many images that they were beyond the capacity traditional drives were supporting. The archiving of images was similarly vexing. How to store them in a library that would allow them to be easily resurfaced later?

Barneys digital studio lives in a space in Queens that’s far removed from the Manhattan headquarters and the New Jersey e-commerce hub. And everyday work requires sharing large image files with partners all over the country and world. “You can only imagine how long it took to get images published on the web,” Perez says, “It was a logistical nightmare.” Technology solutions to support image libraries like this require not just ample and scalable file storage, but the ability to tag images with metadata, automate processes and create sophisticated workflow processes around all of the above.

Bringing in Box brought a combination of flexibility and stability in a centralized, cloud-based content repository that enables the digital studio to keep producing their best work in service of stronger customer-facing assets. The ability to work nimbly with enormous image files has removed the constraints from creative; now, they can truly focus on building the magic into Barneys digital campaigns. And moving content to Box has allowed Barneys to save on infrastructure costs.

“We continue to archive our digital products on Box, enjoying the stability and flexibility offered by this platform.”

— Melvin Perez, Vice President, Technology Operations, Barneys New York

The innovative journey to the future of luxury retail

Building a best-of-breed stack means treating technology vendors as partners — and finding vendors who have the same value system. Perez looks for technology vendors interested in innovating together on a journey to create the future of work in luxury retail. “A big win for us is that Box makes Barneys feel like Box is only working for Barneys,” Perez explains. During the course of the relationship with Box, Barneys has felt empowered to bring up challenges, and Box has been responsive on a granular level.

Content management is just the start. The future of retail is closely connected to the ability to use technology to better personalize the customer experience, and this will come down to better and better use of data and AI. Barneys is already invested in several use cases for AI, helping predict the next important trend for each individual customer, using data from web browsing and purchasing, but also from foot traffic and behaviour in store. Turning to Box has given Barneys a technology partner willing to innovate together to better enable employees and create optimal products.

The blueprint for high-touch retail innovation

• Transform from the mindset of a retail organization into a technology-centric organization with customer experience at the center of the focus
• Leverage all the talent in your greater ecosystem: technology vendors with hands-on expertise, employees with an intimate knowledge of processes and new talent with fresh, bold ideas
• Build on that with artificial intelligence and data to craft personalized experiences for each individual customer