Saturday marks the four-year anniversary of the first day I began working fulltime on Brickwork. It seems a fitting time to reflect on why I founded Brickwork. Before starting Brickwork while in business school, I led marketing for an upstart division of Ralph Lauren. At the time, I was one of two people in the company responsible for marketing activities across a stores business and an e-commerce business. I literally ran between floors for meetings to coordinate our efforts across channels.
While our organization was not entirely set up to run a single marketing and customer engagement strategy across brick & mortar and e-commerce, we began to align our CRM data and analysis. We found quickly that our best customers shopped between channels frequently, spending more overall as a result.
I entered my MBA program with this appreciation for the importance of both channels to build customer value and loyalty. While there, I discovered consistent emerging research coming out of top consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte indicating that a majority (and really up to 80%) of customers who buy in-store begin their path-to-purchase online. They do their discovery, browsing and comparison shopping on their computers and more, their phones before going to store to complete their purchase journey.
Business school gave me the time and space to put these two ideas together to realize there is a massive opportunity to build software to help retailers modernize the shopping experience for this large, important cohort of customers who cross channels on their path to purchase.
Today, that is what we do as the leading SaaS platform for brands and retailers like Nike, Saks Fifth Avenue, West Elm, and Bonobos to modernize the experience and increase the profitability of their brick and mortar business.
Brickwork optimizes the digital presence of retail stores and enables retailers and brands to drive qualified online traffic to unique in-store experiences via geo-location features, online appointment-booking, event RSVP, and local content and marketing. In turn, Brickwork is building the most comprehensive data map of online-to-offline customer journeys.
I am very proud of the work our team has done to bring this obvious but complex idea to life, appreciate of all of the retailers, brands, and investors who have partnered with us over the past four years and excited for what our future holds. Thank you!