Red Wing Shoes is Flying High With a Unified Platform for Data Governance

Strong data governance is crucial for retailers nowadays. To keep up with the competitive market, companies must deliver customer-centric retail strategies that can respond to the ever-changing wants and needs of the consumer. This means developing a data strategy that provides a holistic view of customers. Red Wing Shoes, the durable and comfortable footwear manufacturer, is proving its dedication to providing top-notch customer service by leveraging Semarchy’s unified data platform.

Per its mission “to be a great company that makes a difference in people’s lives,” Red Wing Shoes was looking for a data management platform to improve and expand customer knowledge across each division of the organization. Home to 1,504 employees and a peak revenue of $370 million in 2021, the manufacturer needed a unified data platform that could scale alongside it. Even more so, Red Wing Shoes needed a tool that could manage more than 9 million customer records intelligently in one centralized location.

Jay Wardle, director of enterprise data at Red Wing Shoes, explains why this was no small feat.

“With our old systems, if you had a customer that bought shoes in three different stores and online, they would look like four different $300 customers to us, instead of one $1,200 customer,” he says.

Red Wing Shoes Finds Semarchy’s Data Solution

After reviewing multiple data platforms, Red Wing Shoes selected Semarchy because of its rapid time-to-value, versatility, and emphasis on customer success. Kicking off its journey to better data governance, we began our partnership by providing a 360-degree view of Red Wing Shoes' customers’ assets across North America and Europe. By unifying each customer’s demographic, engagement level, and purchase history into one seamless system, the master data management platform allowed the company’s sales and marketing teams to fully leverage their data.

“With Semarchy, we solved our data quality and master data management issues with one system,” Wardle adds. “Now our customer data contains a single golden record for everyone, making it easy for marketing, sales, and customer service to see the data in real time.”

With a new foundation for successful data governance, Red Wing Shoes can make data-driven decisions, reduce business complexities, and improve the customer experience. More specifically, the shoe manufacturer has been able to personalize its marketing projects better, establish a new point of sale and e-commerce system with clean data, and show a 360-degree view of customer data for its wholesale and industrial B2B2C segments.

A 360-Degree View of Customer Data  

Retailers can no longer view their customers as anonymous individuals. Instead, they must utilize today’s digital transformation technologies to see the complete picture of who they are and what products they're looking for. This shift in perspective will improve the customer service experience, which can generate more revenue and maximize business opportunities.

According to Microsoft, 90 percent of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether to do business with a company. In addition, 58 percent of American consumers claim they will switch companies due to poor customer service. Take these statistics and Red Wing Shoes’ journey to heart when enhancing your customer-centric strategy.

TH Herbert is the CEO of Semarchy, a unified data management platform.