Intermix Reaches Its Fashionable Customers – and Record-High Web Sales – with the MarketLive E-Commerce Platform

Manhattan has always been a Mecca for fashionable young women and, since the mid-1990s, Intermix has been one of New York City’s most fashionable places to shop.  “As our name implies, it’s all about the mix,” says Don McNichol, director of e-commerce at Intermix (www.intermixonline.com).  “We combine different designers and price points to create a look that’s unique, fashion-forward and fabulous.”  After having branched out to bring its New York flair to other cities such as Dallas and Boston, the next big market for Intermix was the Web – which the company quickly conquered, powered by the MarketLive E-Commerce Platform.

Free to focus on customer service
Intermix made its first foray into Web sales with the “soft launch” of an online store in 2004, prior to McNichol’s arrival.  Internally designed, developed and maintained, it was a “site created to test market response,” he says.  The original Intermix site was not heavily promoted, but it did generate a fair amount of revenues, which gave the company an indication of demand.  Ultimately, however, “the operational element and backend weren’t robust enough to deliver the quality of order handling and service our customers expect,” which made the online shopping experience pale in comparison to Intermix’s service-intensive retail environment.

McNichol joined Intermix in September 2005, quickly choosing the MarketLive® E-Commerce Platform to “give us all the technology bells and whistles to portray our brand properly online and deliver a very high quality shopping experience.”  Having worked with MarketLive in the past, McNichol knew that by outsourcing infrastructure and development to MarketLive, he and his team could focus on marketing, merchandising and, most importantly, customer service.  “Every order is managed by my team – we don’t outsource anything.  This is why I chose the MarketLive E-Commerce Platform; I don’t want to be worrying about technology or spending precious resources on activities that don’t touch the customer,” McNichol explains.

The MarketLive solution handles record-high sales with ease
After launching in December 2005 with a stealth marketing effort – the site is not even promoted in the retail stores – the Intermix online store quickly took off.  In a matter of months the number of daily visitors to the site tripled, and sales skyrocketed.  “We are now doing in one week what we used to do in one month – and our one-day sales record exceeds even that,” McNichol says proudly.  He expects online visitors and sales to double every three to four months.

MarketLive handles all aspects of Intermix’s fast growth with ease.  The E-Commerce Platform readily supports high numbers of concurrent users, and has made it easy for McNichol to tie the Web store front end to the back-end systems that support it: “I know how much inventory each store has, allowing our team to route the order to the store that can best fulfill it,” he says.  The  Intermix site has a 90 percent fulfillment rate, which is five to 10 percent above standard market rates.

A solid foundation for growth
“MarketLive has given me everything I need to build as big of a storefront as we could possibly want,” McNichol says.  “The E-Commerce Platform has taken the guesswork out of the user interface design, and the templatizing of elements makes it easy for us to focus on selling and marketing instead of, for example, working on how a user navigates through the site.

“We are a fashion factory here,” he continues.  “We change the Intermix site every other day, creating a new home page every week, and new category pages, too.  Fifty to 100 new products are added every week, and another 30 drop off.  The MarketLive E-Commerce Platform makes it easy for fashion people – not programmers – to make these changes easily, to provide our customers with a fresh selling environment that delivers a consistently high conversion rate.”

McNichol also stresses the important role the MarketLive organization has played in the success of Intermix.com.  “MarketLive has been a great organization to work with, very responsive and helpful.  Not only do they give me a very high-quality product to work with, I am also treated like a valued customer.  My satisfaction is important to MarketLive, and if there are any issues, they are resolved immediately.”  Compared to other, larger service providers that have courted Intermix, McNichol sums up, “MarketLive is the perfect fit for us.  It’s good to be a big fish in a small pond.”