SPANX

Products that promote comfort and confidence

Summary

In 1998, Sara Blakely, the creator of SPANX, was getting dressed for a party and couldn't find the right undergarment, so she cut the feet out of her pantyhose to wear with white pants and open-toed shoes.  From that moment forward, SPANX has achieved extraordinary success and has expanded their product line to ASSETS, Haute Contour, swimwear, and men's.

When SPANX needed a solution to help wear test their products, they turned to Arke Systems.

"We can now focus our efforts on analyzing the data and really studying the results – and quantifying those results against other similar products."
Kyli Cohron, Product Coordinator

Challenge

All new products developed at SPANX go through several wear tests before going to market.  The product development team is responsible for managing the wear testing process, which includes managing a list of thousands of contacts, shipping them demo products, gathering survey feedback, and analyzing the results.

SPANX charged the Product Development group with expanding their wear test program from 200 to 3000 participants in 2010.  Previously, they had managed their wear testing program on spreadsheets and third party survey applications.  This led to inaccurate information, inconsistent communications, and a lot of manual labor.  To reach their 2010 goals, they needed better tools and a unified solution.

One of the biggest challenges for SPANX was finding a solution that appropriately balanced cost and ability to scale. As a fast growing company, it was essential to develop a solution that didn't increase in cost at the same rate as they increased enrollment in their wear testing program.

Solution

Arke Systems worked very closely with SPANX's Product Development and IT groups and became an integral part of the solution design and development process.

SPANX chose the Dynamics CRM platform because it would provide the best wear tester and data management experience.  IT found benefit because they could easily extend the solution to provide new workflows and new applications to other departments.  Product Development found benefit because all email communications get tracked in CRM, importing and exporting data view Excel was easy, they could create their own reports to analyze survey results, and mining their database to find the best wear testing group was easy through CRM's advanced find capabilities.

Brad Bell, SPANX's CFO, found that the Dynamics CRM solution provided the best value for the current and future goals.

Results

The solution deployed smoothly, successfully, and quickly.  SPANX is happy with their reduced workload due to the system's automation and workflows.  When Kyli Cohron, SPANX's wear testing manager, used the system for the first time, her reaction was, "that was easy!"

Prior to implementing our solution, SPANX would have needed to hire three additional staff to achieve their goals.  With our Dynamics CRM solution, SPANX didn't need to hire additional staff and was able to free up two people's schedules to take on new responsibilities.

Product Development now has an accurate list of wear testers and they trust their information. They are able to author a new survey, invite wear testers, and ship product in under an hour rather than days. The email communication to wear testers is now accurate and the content of those emails is consistent. Execution of each product test is now consistent and requires far less internal collaboration.

With SPANX’s previous solution, losing surveys and registrations was a normal occurrence. Their ability to scale the program was limited to their time to manually manage emails and registrations requests. On the first day going live with the new system, SPANX tripled their wear tester enrollment in an afternoon. Doing so required only about 30 minutes of effort—something that would have taken days or weeks in the previous solution.

Generating reports in the old solution required manually compiling survey results into a spreadsheet. Now, executives can instantly generate their own reports from live data without demanding anyone’s time or worrying about the accuracy of the data.

With all of their survey and contact data in the Dynamics CRM database, SPANX can rapidly segment their data to target better lists of wear testers, compare results across different products, and distribute emails to large lists of contacts.

Performing the wear tests used to take weeks of preparation. Now Product Development can focus more effort on product design instead of weeks of preparing surveys and reports.