Licensed sports apparel retailer Lids Sports Group is going to bat with a new app.

After its previous app struck out, Lids, a brand of Genesco Inc., No. 525 in the just-released Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000 Guide, decided to change the kind of content it provides in the app. Instead of focusing on shopping, this time the app will be a hub for consumers to keep track of their loyalty points.

Lids had a shopping app, built in-house, for about three years, then stopped adding content to it in 2015 and officially shut it down in 2016. Not many consumers used it, pages loaded slowly and products were hard to find, says Jeff Pearson, senior vice president of e-commerce at Lids.

“It just wasn’t easy to use, and if you spent time in it and really wanted to make a purchase, you would have just exited it and gone to your desktop,” he says.

After ditching the original app, Lids focused its attention on relaunching its website to be mobile-friendly with responsive design, which allows the website to format to the screen the consumer is viewing. “As the company was preparing to make that effort, the resources for the app to keep it up and functioning just weren’t there,” Pearson says.

Mobile is an important part of Lids’ business, as smartphones account for 60% of the retailer’s traffic and between 40-50% of its online sales. Total online sales are about $85 million a year, he says. After the new website launched in May 2016, Lids began to focus on building a new mobile app.

The goal of the app is to make shoppers more loyal by giving them easy access to Lids’ relaunched loyalty program, Lids Access Pass (free for consumers) and Access Pass Premium ($5 annually). Lids hopes that more than 10% of its annual customers, whether they shop online or in stores, will download the app, Pearson says, though he declines to give the number of Lids customers. On average, an online Lids customer makes a purchase on Lids.com 1.5 times a year, Pearson says.

Jeff Pearson, senior vice president of e-commerce, Lids.

In the app, consumers can track how many points (which are redeemable for dollars) they have earned, view special sales and sweepstakes promotions, and look at Lids’ social media feeds—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube—in one spot. Consumers can tap the menu, hit Shop and the app will redirect the consumer to the mobile website. However there is no shopping component that is native, or lives, in the app, Pearson says.

To keep consumers using the app, Lids plans to send several  push notifications a month about sales, events or sweepstakes. If the push notification is about a sale, a consumer who taps on it will be directed to the mobile web, as opposed to the app.

Lids charges consumers $5 annually to be in its premium Access Pass club, which gives shoppers deeper discounts and allows them to accumulate points faster than consumers in the free program. While $5 is a fraction of the $99 annual fee for Amazon’s Prime loyalty program, Pearson says $5 is the perfect amount because it’s a low barrier for shoppers. Plus, once a shopper is a premium member, she is more likely to buy more products, Pearson say without revealing specifics.

The retailer is promoting the new app via email, digital banner ads, direct mail and radio advertising. Lids also is bidding on key words, such as “Indianapolis Colts” in the Google App store and Apple’s App store so its app shows up higher when a consumer searches for those terms. The retailer has between 4 and 5 million active email subscribers, with an active subscriber defined as one who has opened a Lids email at least once in the past 90 days, Pearson says. The retailer is making sure its marketing messages for the new app explain that it has a new focus and is not just a better version of their old app, he says.

Lids used mobile app developer Appirio to build the app. It took about four and half months to launch the app and more than 10 Lids employees were involved in the development, he says. The app cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and for ongoing licensing fees, he says.

Lids Sports Group division operates the Lids hat stores, the Locker Room by Lids stores, and team sports fan shops and single-team clubhouse stores. It operates within Genesco’s Hat World Inc. subsidiary.