App-only Jenzy is working to ensure that children wear the correct shoe size.
The retailer launched its Apple Inc. iOS e-commerce app two weeks ago at the end of June in the App Store. The Jenzy app sells about 65 SKUs of children’s shoes from 12 different brands. The app has a feature that measures a child’s foot and suggests the correct size shoe for each of its SKUs.
In the two weeks since Jenzy’s launch, 500 consumers have downloaded the Jenzy app, 250 consumers have completed the sizing tool and about 25 consumers have made a purchase, Ackerley says. So far, no customers have returned any shoes, Ackerley says. The retailer wants to keep this proportion of roughly half of downloads completing sizing and about 10% converting, Ackerley says. Jenzy makes about a 15%-50% margin on each purchase, she says.
The app will then give a range for the child’s shoe size, which will include about eight to 12 millimeters of growing room to ensure the shoes will still fit in a few months as well, says co-founder Carolyn Horner.
As the shopper browses within the app, product pages will populate the correct shoe size for each SKU—shoe sizes differ from brand to brand and even within a brand. Whenever Jenzy adds a SKU to its site, the retailer manually measures each shoe’s internal and external dimensions, plus notes its material, lace type and shoe style into a database.
“When we recommend that 6.5, we’re confident it’s going to fit,” Horner says.
The co-founders were inspired to develop a digital tool that could accurately size a child’s foot for shoes because of the lack of sophisticated online tools, Horner says. Sometimes, online retailers offer a measurement tool that shoppers have to print to size the foot, she says. Plus, many of the specialty children’s shoe stores that would size children’s feet, such as Stride Rite Corp., are now closed, and mass merchants such as Target Corp. (No. 17 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 500) and Walmart Inc. (No. 3) stores don’t always offer children’s shoes-sizing services in stores, Horner says.
For its initial downloads, the retailer ran an influencer campaign in which it had 10 mom bloggers preview the app, write blog posts and giveaway products to their followers. The co-founders also spread the word through their own mom groups.
Over the next three to four months, Jenzy will closely monitor customer feedback to determine where it will next dedicate its resources, such as to build an Android app or a robust e-commerce website. Right now, shoppers cannot checkout on its website.
Jenzy has raised $330,000 from friends and family and will likely raise more funding in the fall, Horner says.
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