Ashley Stewart had a vision that would allow them to segment and deliver personalized mobile marketing for right-time, right-place offers and loyalty incentives. Vibes’ mobile-first platform provided them with what they needed to take their mobile program to the next level.
Founded in 1991, Ashley Stewart is a leading fashion, multi-media brand serving curvy women throughout the United States and select international locations, with 71 stores across the United States, a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform and an integrated and explosive social media presence, Ashley Stewart is on the forefront of omni-channel retail.
In 2024, Lee Washington, Director of CRM and Loyalty at Ashley Stewart, had been working alongside his team with a different SMS provider to engage shoppers and drive them into their retail stores. However, leadership decided that they wanted to lean even further into mobile and revamp their approach, ensuring that any new mobile provider worked exceptionally well with their CDP.
As part of the Ashley Stewart team’s due diligence in looking for the right provider, they wanted to make sure that not only would their new mobile engagement platform easily integrate into their CDP, but that its usability was first-rate. With the company’s previous provider, they were often forced to reach out to the vendor to create reporting for them, and therefore needed a more open UI from which they could pull, adjust, track, and run a multitude of campaigns on their own.
They found, in talking to Vibes, that the company’s mobile engagement platform was priced very competitively, and checked all the boxes for what they were looking for. Washington said that “the ability to be able to access the stack and do things that we hadn't been able to do before made Vibes very appealing. The combination of this, along with the Vibes team, and some of the ideas of what they were doing with some other brands became a no-brainer that made us say hey, now's the time to really test this out”.
They launched with Vibes and our mobile-first engagement platform later in 2024, and haven’t looked back.
The launch collaboration between Vibes and Ashley Stewart was smooth, with Vibes taking the lead and setting up the initial campaigns to help Ashley Stewart begin to benchmark what success might look like. The initial channel launched was SMS, with MMS later coming on in 2025, and RCS in 2026.
Ashley Stewart believes that Vibes has provided them what they call “omnipresent orchestration” for the very first time. Whereas messages to customers had been relatively the same and generic in previous campaigns, no matter a given user’s behavior, campaigns now being run in the Vibes platform allow them to not have to take a “cookie-cutter, batch-and-blast approach”.
The company is working to build a program around Vibes’ integration with Brevo to see, for instance, in the words of Lee Washington: “Person A opened on her birthday, so now let's use a webhook to determine the next message that we're going to send her. It's about timing and all that centralization, and looking at it and saying, how do we make the channels work in unison together to tell the right customer-specific story?”.
Washington says he quickly learned that “Vibes really thinks about campaigns from the customer standpoint and how to position them. Because they have so many clients, they really have a good sense of what's working, what's not working, and what offers that we might put out, with the right taglines”.
One recent example mentioned points to the partnership he’s built with his Vibes account team:
“I was excited about a particular MMS that we launched last week. My account team at Vibes and I were going through the process, and they told me ‘Lee, everything looks good, you can safely come to work tomorrow, because messages are going to go out, they're going to be fine.' But Vibes also helped us with the subject line – made it a teaser that said ‘just for your eyes’. When we looked at that campaign response rate, it was 17-18%, so that was definitely impressive. So now we're going in on the back end, and we're starting to analyze the characteristics of the customers who responded to it.”
From the beginning, Vibes and Ashley Stewart were able to work closely together to form a true partnership, with the vision and mission of Ashley Stewart, and not merely a vendor/client relationship.
Washington says that “Vibes not only has the technology we need to engage our customers over mobile, but also the creativity and strong account team that goes along with it. They’re like our coaches or big brothers, looking over our shoulders and helping advise us how we can push the limit. That gives Ashley Stewart the ability to be very, very smart with our budget.”
Vibes and Ashley Stewart worked closely at launch on an acquisition campaign at stores and other sign-up channels to bring in new SMS subscribers. Through QR codes and other sign-up mechanisms, Vibes was able to help Ashley Stewart capture not only new SMS numbers but also to serve as a bridge to help capture email addresses as well, pushing those over in real time due to the integration with Brevo. "That's been huge for us, because we were missing out on those opportunities of being able to capture all of the customer's information at one time”, said Washington.
One key Ashley Stewart campaign has been focused on creating dynamic and highly customized loyalty rewards for targeted customer segments, such as military service members or teachers. The Vibes platform not only provides Ashley Stewart with detailed, actionable reporting on these campaigns, but also the flexibility to re-message certain customers based on a variety of triggers and actions. “This helps us to be able to give them a relevant message, that you haven't made a purchase - but it's not too late!”, says Washington.
All of this has led to a 180 improvement in customer engagement, translating into increased revenue, repeat purchases, and stronger customer retention. It is a partnership that’s “just at the tip of the iceberg”, according to Washington, and will develop further in coming months as RCS begins to reach maturity in the United States and is deployed across Ashley Stewart’s opted-in customer base.
From the beginning, Vibes and Ashley Stewart were able to work closely together to form a true partnership, with the vision and mission of Ashley Stewart, and not merely a vendor/client relationship.
Washington says that “Vibes not only has the technology we need to engage our customers over mobile, but also the creativity and strong account team that goes along with it. They’re like our coaches or big brothers, looking over our shoulders and helping advise us how we can push the limit. That gives Ashley Stewart the ability to be very, very smart with our budget.”
Vibes and Ashley Stewart worked closely at launch on an acquisition campaign at stores and other sign-up channels to bring in new SMS subscribers. Through QR codes and other sign-up mechanisms, Vibes was able to help Ashley Stewart capture not only new SMS numbers but also to serve as a bridge to help capture email addresses as well, pushing those over in real time due to the integration with Brevo. "That's been huge for us, because we were missing out on those opportunities of being able to capture all of the customer's information at one time”, said Washington.
One key Ashley Stewart campaign has been focused on creating dynamic and highly customized loyalty rewards for targeted customer segments, such as military service members or teachers. The Vibes platform not only provides Ashley Stewart with detailed, actionable reporting on these campaigns, but also the flexibility to re-message certain customers based on a variety of triggers and actions. “This helps us to be able to give them a relevant message, that you haven't made a purchase - but it's not too late!”, says Washington.
All of this has led to a 180 improvement in customer engagement, translating into increased revenue, repeat purchases, and stronger customer retention. It is a partnership that’s “just at the tip of the iceberg”, according to Washington, and will develop further in coming months as RCS begins to reach maturity in the United States and is deployed across Ashley Stewart’s opted-in customer base.
"Vibes not only has the technology we need to engage our customers over mobile, but also the creativity and strong account team that goes along with it. They’re like our coaches or big brothers, looking over our shoulders and helping advise us how we can push the limit. That gives Ashley Stewart the ability to be very, very smart with our budget.”
Director of CRM & Loyalty
