Fashion brand, GANT, has created a digitally connected global community for its frontline workers in partnership with Yoobic.

“Our in-store colleagues play such a pivotal role as they are the ones that meet and serve our customers every day,” says Maria Klingh, Global Retail Director at GANT.

“Their interaction with the customer creates an opportunity to engage and build a relationship. Therefore, it is crucial that we support them and we have been investing in processes and tools to facilitate a smoother employee experience giving them time to focus on the customer while in-store.”

Accordingly, GANT deployed the Yoobic mobile first platform in 2020 – initially focusing on streamlining and improving visual merchandising compliance.

It launched a series of missions, delivered to staff on their mobile devices in the flow of work, communicating guidelines and providing a place to capture feedback and comments.

This standardised process for capturing data provided visibility on VM compliance across local and global head offices, resulting in a much higher quality of visual execution with consistently high standards upheld in each store.

Building on this in 2021 GANT launched its training operation, the GANT Academy, on Yoobic, creating a digital hub for communications, training and engagement which, currently, more than 2,000 store associates and retail leaders use.

A dedicated ‘inspiration’ section of the Academy aims to help build retail experiences by providing diverse courses on music, art, and even Netflix content designed to support store teams to have interesting and meaningful conversations with customers that connect beyond GANT’s product offering.

Additionally, GANT has utilised Yoobic to create the Academy Social Club where frontline staff share news and images, participate in competitions, and celebrate wins, all designed to foster engagement amongst the workforce and forge a strong, collaborative culture in its teams.

“One of the smart things Yoobic provides is the automated translation of comments into a user’s native language so we overcome the language barrier, which is very present when you operate in a global environment,” says Klingh.

“Now we have, which is amazing to see, store associates in Shanghai chatting or giving tips or engaging with our store staff in Paris and this we really believe creates a sense of belonging and being part of a greater, global community.”

Today, 90% of GANT’s retail employees use Yoobic to learn, communicate, and find information on a weekly basis, with 80% accessing the app on their private mobile and 20% using the retailer’s in-store tablets.

GANT says it has seen a 30% increase in completed training in comparison to its previous platform.

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