Casual Male Retail Group Inc.

Big Ideas Solve Tall Orders

Acquity Group builds a sophisticated, multi-brand eCommerce site designed to reflect Casual Male’s new, all-in-one brand, Destination XL.Casual Male Retail Group is the leading retailer of men’s big and tall apparel, offering a comprehensive selection of products across a variety of brands and sizes for its specialty market. With operations spanning the U.S., Canada and Europe, the company boasts more than 450 brick-andmortar stores as well as catalog and eCommerce divisions.

The Casual Male Retail Group umbrella offers five distinct brands, spanning a variety of price points and styles, in the marketplace: Casual Male XL, Rochester Clothing, B&T Factory Direct, Shoes XL and Living XL.

Leveraging research conducted in 2009, Casual Male determined that big and tall apparel customers were expressing a need for more apparel and product choices, across brands, prices, and sizes, in a single store setting. This realization led to the creation of Destination XL, a physical superstore that aggregated all five Casual Male brands and products under one roof. Although each brand would continue to exist, the advantage of Destination XL was that it allowed customers to access the world’s most extensive line of big and tall products in a one-stop shopping experience.

In 2010, Casual Male approached Acquity Group for assistance in developing a digital presence that would mirror the physical store concept of the new Destination XL brand.

“The success of DestinationXL stores can be attributed to our customer’s experience of being able to fulfill their apparel needs regardless of their demographic characteristic or socioeconomic position. Of our 450 retail locations, nearly 300 will convert to Destination XL stores over the next few years. To complete the retail experience, we needed to develop a website that simulated what was happening in-store. It had to offer our customers an easy-tonavigate online experience that allowed them to conveniently shop by size across their lifestyle preferences and desired price points.” says Dennis Hernreich, Casual Male’s COO and CFO.

Specifically, Casual Male needed a hosted eCommerce solution that would offer customers a comprehensive shopping experience and bring the Casual Male brands under a single digital roof.

The Destination XL solution would need to provide multiple ways for customers to understand the product assortment (over 15,000 styles) and allow them to quickly locate product options based on a variety of criteria. The new site would have to enable consumers to easily identify their favorite Casual Male products, introduce them to new options under the Destination XL umbrella, and allow them to seamlessly shop with one cart across the website.

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Big Ideas Solve Tall Orders

Launch a Digital Superstore With Casual Male Retail Group

DestinationXL.com ChallengeThe task of designing and building a Destination XL eCommercesolution presented several significant challenges:

1. User Experience One of the project’s critical concerns wasthe creation of a user-friendly online experience that wouldn’tlose or frustrate customers in the midst of an online superstorewith thousands of products and over 650,000 SKUs. Search,navigation, site organization and other features would need to be carefully designed, and learnings about the shopping preferences and behaviors of men in the 25-54 year old age bracket had to be incorporated.

2. Merchandising Despite Casual Male’s clear success in apparel retailing, DestinationXL.com called for an impressive skill set in the area of digital merchandising. To be successful, Casual Male recognized that the solution would need to incorporate “shop by size” filters, product reviews and other advanced features. Consequently, Acquity Group would need to work closely with Casual Male to equip the brand with the skills necessary to navigate new merchandising waters.

3. Sophistication From the outset, it was clear that the creation of DestinationXL.com would demand more than a basic site redesign. Destination XL was a completely new concept with its own brand, and would require Acquity Group to aggregate the breadth of product lines from five distinct brands into a new, multichannel digital identity.

The process was further complicated by the fact that when Acquity Group began work on the project, Destination XL’s physical stores were still nearing completion—in many ways, DXL brand elements were being created in parallel to Acquity Group’s construction of its digital presence.

4. Aesthetics Each of Casual Male’s five brands represented a distinct product market and independent business unit. Over time, each brand had developed its own aesthetic and unique visual traits. Since the new solution would aggregate all five brands into a single website, Acquity Group would need to drive the development of a coherent overall visual style for Destination XL.

Building Destination XLTo help Casual Male create an online presence that would mirror the brick-and-mortar Destination XL experience, Acquity Group executed a multi-phase strategy that leveraged new learnings as well as proven experience in the digital space.

During the discovery phase, Acquity Group researched the way bigand tall men shop for clothing—information that was vital in thedevelopment of user personas and the creation of an optimized user experience.

One of the critical insights gleaned during this phase was that menare targeted shoppers. Unlike many female shoppers, men don’tbrowse—they shop based on an immediate need and expect animmediate payoff for their efforts. This understanding would play akey role in design, contributing to the development of a frameworkthat allows users to quickly locate desired products.

Another part of the discovery phase required Acquity Group to gather information about Casual Male’s processes and assets, including the collaborative review of blueprints and site plans, for Destination XL brick-and-mortar stores. By reviewing blueprints with the Casual Male team, Acquity Group could ensure that the eCommerce site would accurately support the customer’s experience in the brand’s physical retail locations.

“We are happy to now offer

our customers the entire collection of Casual MaleRetail Group’s product catalogs in a powerful, one-stop-shop web experience.”

Dennis HernreichCasual Male’s COO and CFO

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ResultsBy all accounts, DestinationXL.com has been a / Results complete success—effectively translating the Destination XL brand into an eCommerce superstore. The new site successfully handled the 2011 Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend with no glitches or downtime.

DestinationXL.com customers have instant exposure to all five brands and the complete Casual Male product catalog. The solution satisfies customer demand for access to a variety of product and allows them to efficiently shop by their unique size; site architecture delivers a user experience that has been finely tuned to reflect customer shopping patterns and the Destination XL in-store shopping experience. The website also substantially improves Casual Male’s ability to cross-sell and upsell customers in the digital space.

From a technical standpoint, the new Destination XL platform negated the need for an internal development organization. Rather than having to maintain six different web applications, there is now a single web application maintained by Acquity Group. This creates efficiencies not only in the area of site maintenance, but also for catalog and content changes—which are now performed across the application with a single entry.

“We are happy to now offer our customers the entire collection of Casual Male Retail Group’s product catalogs in a powerful, one-stop-shop web experience,” says Hernreich. “Our project team clearly understood the project goals and aspirationsand worked tirelessly for the last year to make DestinationXL. com a reality. We are excited to continue to evolve our digital presence through mobile and in-store tablet capabilities.”

Acquity Group will serve as Casual Male’s strategic eCommerce partner on a go-forward basis and will support the new Destination XL integrated shopping model. In addition to providing assistance for regular waves of site updates, Acquity Group will play a primary role in mobile and tablet architecture experience design and development planned for customers and in-store sales associates.

Based on these insights, Acquity Group created several designs thatwere eventually tested with clickable prototypes. Although the team initially believed Casual Male customers would prefer immediate visibility to a large array of products, testing revealed that this concept didn’t mesh with marketplace realities.

Instead, users reported feeling overwhelmed by an overabundanceof options. By reducing the number of categories at the top level of the site, Acquity Group brought the design in line with customer preferences, significantly improving user confidence and conversion rates.

Acquity Group also worked with Casual Male to better understandthe photographic elements of the site and to make the site’s images more consistent with Destination XL’s brand aesthetic.

Following multiple rounds of design and testing, Acquity Groupdelivered an eCommerce solution that aligned well with theDestination XL concept and incorporated features tailored to Casual Male’s customer preferences:

Home Page Visibility The homepage of the site features top line visibility to the brand’s major product categories (Clothing, Shoes, Accessories, Home & Living, etc.) as well as identifiable tabs that allow users to go directly to each of Destination XL’s five distinct brands.

Size Profiler Since size and fit are critical factors for big and tall apparel shoppers, across products and styles, Acquity Group incorporated a size profiler into the site design. The size profiler is a customization tool that allows customers to enter and save their size preferences, ensuring that they will only be shown products that meet their precise size and fit specifications. The site also allows users to sort selections by price, material, product features, color and brand.

Shared Shopping Cart Users have the ability to shop all Casual Male brands across the website using a shared shopping cart, mimicking the experience in brick-and-mortar Destination XL stores.

Outfitting The outfitting feature is a valuable merchandising tool that provides customers with image-based suggestions for outfits, again reflecting the in-store Destination XL experience and bringing together products from Casual Male’s various brands into a single visual display.

To accommodate the new features and functionality, and provide a stronger technology foundation to support the site, Acquity Group upgraded the existing Oracle ATG Commerce solution, implemented ATG’s Search capability and managed integration with Casual Male’s external marketing partners, bridging the gap between experience design and technology fulfillment.

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