The Best Kept Secret
Digital Wave Technology is making waves for its customers by driving over $1B in revenue and growth across digital sales channels. In addition to its highly innovative product platform, Digital Wave’s real power comes from the imagination passion, deep domain knowledge, and experience of its team.
At the helm of Digital Wave is successful retail software entrepreneur Lori Schafer, who first made splashes several decades ago in brand management at Procter & Gamble and then as CEO of Marketmax, Inc. (later acquired by SAS Institute). In addition to building three successful startups, Ms. Schafer is a former NRF Board member, has served on several public retailer and consumer products boards of directors, and is the co-author of the best-selling business book Branded! Ms. Schafer left her role as SVP of SAS Institute’s Retail and Consumer Goods Division several years ago to jump back into the foray of entrepreneurship.
As CEO of Digital Wave Technology, Ms. Schafer assembled a team of former retailers, current thought leaders, and technology innovators to tackle the problem of helping brands and retailers excel in a world of endless waves of new channels, devices, platforms, and technologies. She also instilled a culture of servant leadership and “white glove service” for customers. Despite the large array of existing technologies, Digital Wave understood the industry’s need for a modern omni-channel architecture built from the ground up. Together, the team developed and refined a low code “MACH” architecture platform (Microservices API-first Cloud-native Headless).
The company’s highly innovative Product Platform now combines Retail Planning & Management, Price & Markdown Optimization, and AI Analytics with its foundational Product Experience Management Suite (Product Information Management, Master Data Management, Digital Asset Management, enterprise workflow, automation, governance and syndication to all digital channels.) The platform enables brands and retailers to give consumers a great experience wherever they shop. The results couldn’t tell a better story:
- Measurable increase in gross and bottom-line profits
- Significantly accelerated speed to market
- Eliminated “not on digital” inventory
- Reduced returns
- Generated efficiency gains to drive human and capital redeployment
Digital Wave is investing heavily in AI and machine learning to drive analytics, workflow, product enrichment, and many other aspects of its end-to-end platform. The recently released AI and Analytics capabilities are being met with fanfare among customers that include NRF 100 global brands and retailers.
It won’t be a secret for long—Digital Wave is locking down its position in the market, providing significant value to its customers, differentiating its offerings, and charging forward supported by a world-class team committed to service.
The Retailer’s Favorite
“We conducted a rigorous evaluation of the PIM market, and the Digital Wave Platform was the best fit for us,” said Bill Quinn, SVP Marketing and Digital at Hibbett, Inc. “We engaged the Digital Wave Technology team to improve our product building process which is critical to our accelerated growth strategy.”
“The Digital Wave team focused on understanding our business and processes. They listened intently, learned, and offered a great deal about best practices for product experience management. They showed us, from day one, they were the right partner for us,” said Dempsey Carter, Director of Ecommerce at Cavender Stores, LTD. “Their solution will make it easier than ever for us to publish our product stories quickly online and improve site merchandising and searchability, resulting in reduced time to market and a better overall product experience for our customers. The flexibility and future-proof nature of the Digital Wave Platform is going to enable us to be more innovative, faster with our digital strategy.”
Digital Wave Technology strives to be its customers’ preferred, most impactful partner. To be a great solutions provider, the technology must live up to or exceed promises made during the sales cycle. The reasons why Digital Wave is the “The Favorite,” however, are far more human: The team’s passion starts with its CEO Lori Schafer, who has created a culture of excellence, gratitude, humility, hard work, and fun! Because each member of the team brings retail, brand, and related technology experience, the group is seen as a peer and sounding board by customers. At Digital Wave, creating success is a team effort!
Digital Wave prioritizes learning as much as possible about each customer, its business, strategy, competitors, and market position, visiting physical stores when possible and shopping its products on digital channels. This gives context for best understanding goals, business objectives, and day-in-the-life challenges that simple discovery doesn’t provide.
“We move heaven and earth for our customers—no matter the time of day, day of week, or time of year,” said Ms. Schafer. The company works hard to continually earn the business of its customers and to make the working relationship frictionless and fun. It is for these reasons, and many others, that Digital Wave Technology is the brand and retailer’s favorite partner!
Customer Experience Marketing Automation
Modern shoppers discover products through endless channels on all types of devices. Today, in-store shopping is seeing a resurgence, proving again that omnichannel capabilities are critical for brands and retailers.
Reaching customers seamlessly with compelling product content, optimized for each channel, is a major challenge for brands and retailers. Each channel has specific presentation requirements – e.g., Pinterest supports a limited number of photos and text cannot have bullets, while a company’s own website offers unlimited real estate for product content and assets. Keeping on top of each channel, staying familiar with unique requirements, and frequently refreshing content is daunting and difficult to manage. Brands and retailers need cutting edge technology.
Enter Digital Wave Technology!
The Digital Wave Platform, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI / ML), is composed of product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM), master data management (MDM), Product AI solutions and more, makes it easy for brands and retailers to access, manage, deliver, and power product content internally across their organization and externally across marketing channels.
- Digital marketers use Digital Wave to publish perfectly formatted, rich social posts of trending products for sale.
- Direct mail and print media marketers leverage Digital Wave’s Adobe InDesign connector to create dazzling product brochures, flyers, and mailers.
- Merchants and digital teams use Digital Wave to enrich and optimize channel-specific content.
- Customer support teams access Digital Wave when responding to calls and emails.
- Store associates rely on Digital Wave to tell compelling product stories to in-store shoppers / clientele.
Brands and retailers are using Digital Wave to get their products out to market faster than the competition, increase basket size, conversions, and inventory turns, reduce product returns, and enter new markets and channels in hours or days!
What is Digital Wave’s secret?
The Digital Wave Platform is the single place to go – and know – all things product. It centralizes all product content, media assets, and storytelling; driving efficiency using workflow, automation, data governance and artificial intelligence. The product journey within a brand or retailer typically requires many hands to perform a series of tasks. With Digital Wave workflow acting as the conductor, teams collaborate like a world-class orchestra – in total sync.
Using AI / ML, the platform streamlines channel-specific content creation. Whether that’s content for different languages, currencies, geographies, or customer segments, all of it is done in Digital Wave Platform. If a brand or retailer wants to speed and spice up romance copy, with a single command Digital Wave Product AI will author exciting romance copy, in nearly any language, that is just a one-click approval away from being published to any channel. Further, Digital Wave Product AI automatically validates and suggests attributes for products, which improves SEO and product discoverability.
Delivering great customer experience means ensuring buyers find the products they’re looking for, when they’re looking for them, optimized for each channel, and accompanied by compelling product stories and rich media. Leading brands and retailers rely on Digital Wave’s Platform to excite their customers across all touchpoints!