Spring 2.0: The shopping app looks to reinvent

To complement the launch of the company’s updated app in July, Spring is promoting its new look with a video released today in partnership with fashion influencers Coco Baudelle and Marcel Floruss. The new app uses consumer data to identify recommended products by analyzing browsing history and personal preferences, such as size, style and price point. It also includes editorial content tailored to each individual user to help with product discovery, with recent features focused on topics including hot-weather workwear and summer travel apparel.

The transformed platform comes at a time of much experimentation with artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand shopper behavior. For Spring, which struggled to navigate a saturated mobile commerce market and the fluctuating sentiment of brands toward apps, its latest iteration indicates a reinvention for the company. This was paired with a strategic overhaul of its executive team over the last six months, which included the appointment of several positions such as chief operating officer and chief product officer.

“We realized the way our consumers are shopping was evolving,” said Rob Willey, recently appointed chief marketing officer at Spring. “No longer was our consumer looking to shop head-to-toe; [they were] looking for experiences based on their own personal profiles.”

The updated Spring app

While the depiction of Baudelle and Floruss in the video browsing and shopping on the app from the moment they wake up until they hit the pillow at night might be a bit of a stretch, the ad is intended to show how the new Spring fits into the lives of its consumers.

“We started to take a look at what personalization means for our consumer, and how he or she shops. One of the insights we came to was how consumers live within culture,” Willey said. “We wanted to show real-life experiences through a day in the life of two people who are clearly busy and are shopping online on a consistent basis.”

Spring, which first hit the market in August 2014, has weathered an initial identify crisis that resulted from casting too wide a net. Despite launching with the goal of becoming the top mobile shopping app in the fashion world, it struggled to draw users — many were already using programs including Lyst and ShopStyle, and didn’t understand the draw of Spring. In response, it transitioned its efforts to its desktop platform, as it reconsidered mobile and identified new ways to lure consumers. It also got savvier at product selection, culling its original 3,000 brands down to 1,500, driven by consumer preferences.

Today, the company continues to assert that more than 50 percent of its sales are derived by mobile, and touts its policy of free shipping and free returns. Willey said that Spring plans to integrate personalization features into the desktop version of Spring in 2018, but is focusing on streamlining the app version first, in an attempt to avoid “feature parity” and differentiate the mobile experience .

“It’s still the very early days of personalization and what the future of shopping really looks like. It’s really an outcome of how consumers want to shop every day,” he said.