Fashion and beauty retail stands at a critical inflexion point where digital transformation meets physical retail demand. With 70 percent of retail sales now digitally influenced, according to The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company’s The State of Fashion 2025 report, the industry faces unprecedented complexity in managing customer relationships across the shopping journey.
The latest knowledge report from BoF, Rethinking Fashion and Beauty’s Digital Customer Experience — in partnership with Braze — examines how fashion and beauty retailers can use advanced personalisation, omnichannel synergies and adaptable technology systems to create sustainable customer engagement.
While consumers increasingly discover products through social media and artificial intelligence-powered tools, physical stores remain essential. This dual dependency creates the “phygital” experience, where seamless integration between digital and physical touchpoints becomes a competitive necessity, according to Meredith Mitchell, head of retail and e-commerce industry marketing at Braze — a customer engagement platform that enables digital experiences to foster loyalty, increase customer lifetime value and drive business growth.
This report examines the macro-context under which fashion and beauty brands are operating today, before exploring the interconnected challenges that define the current customer engagement landscape. The final section offers strategies for success, from scaling hyper-personalisation to orchestrating cross-channel presence.
Below, BoF shares what you can expect from the report.
Chapter 1: Macro Context: The Digital Customer Engagement Landscape
This chapter explores the current state of digital customer engagement in the fashion and beauty industries, providing businesses with a clear understanding of the key challenges and emerging opportunities.
Key insights:
- Forty-seven percent of retailers say they are extremely or very concerned that their messaging isn’t resonating with customers.
- Navigating customer engagement has become even harder amid growing regulatory pressures on data privacy and tracking technologies.
- Physical retail is still recovering from the double impact of the rise of e-commerce and the Covid-19 pandemic. Retailers are operating through fragmented systems with customer data scattered across physical and digital touchpoints.
Chapter 2: Core Challenges: Unpacking Customer Engagement Pain Points
This section examines the four critical challenges that fashion and beauty brands face while reimagining their omnichannel customer engagement strategies.
Key insights:
- The digital-physical divide represents one of retail’s most costly missed opportunities: brands struggle to deliver seamless integration in line with customer expectations.
- Brand loyalty has evolved from a habitual purchasing pattern to an active, values-driven evaluation of every brand interaction.
- Consumers have grown accustomed to hyper-personalised, frictionless online experiences across platforms. However, many retailers aren’t yet using advanced customer data to truly understand and target their audience.
Chapter 3: Strategies for Success: How to Optimise Online Digital Engagement
This chapter delves into practical approaches that can support retailers in crafting a cohesive customer engagement strategy, from scaling hyper-personalisation to orchestrating cross-channel presence.
Key insights:
- Retailers that remain trapped in rudimentary demographic segmentation miss the opportunity to create individualised experiences that drive conversion and premium pricing power.
- New technologies allow retailers to convert physical interactions into digitised insights and continued cross-channel sales.
- The emergence of “composable” technology means marketers can now deliver campaigns and consistent experiences faster than ever.
This is a sponsored feature paid for by Braze as part of a BoF partnership.
