Personalization Audit: Kith

The Kith website definitely feels wildly different than your typical Shopify brand (at least until you get to checkout). But just because their site feels different, doesn't mean Kith should be a slouch when it comes to personalization. Find out where they're hitting the right note and where there's room for improvement in this latest edition of our Personalization Audits (and get the lowdown on how this all started over here).

Kith personalization strategy audit

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Cult favorite Kith is the brainchild of Ronnie Fieg, a well-known footwear industry insider that's been in the game since he was 12 years old.

Apart from his love of shoes, Fieg is a born and bred New Yorker that back in 2007, wanted to create a truly 'New York line' of clothing that matched the city's aesthetic. Enter Kith. Thanks to Fieg's established reputation, Kith was a success, launching an actual shop a few years later (and ecommerce following after that).

With an eclectic mix of house brands, special collaborations, and curated collections, Kith has branched into men's, women's, and children's wear, as well as their own lineup of treats (including a cereal bar concept) that have made them a truly stand apart hybrid brand / retail concept.

Because of its diversity of brands, collections, collaborations, and audiences, the opportunities for Kith to offer personalization are pretty extensive. There are a dozen different directions each individual shopper could go in, and given Kith's unique navigation (particularly off the home page) it can potentially present a challenge for a customer to find a frictionless shopping journey that gets them to the right product at the right time.

What Kith got right

• In-cart cross-sells:Add an item to cart and Kith's Ajax slideout features not one, but three cross-sells that can be added to the cart with a single click. The featured items do not appear to update based on what the customer has in their cart, but are cheaper, gender-neutral 'add-ons' that are sure to tempt a few shoppers into topping up their cart.

Areas for Kith to enhance

• Product detail page (PDP) cross-sells: In general, the Kith site is lacking in personalization, but there are related products (typically driven by collections) visible on the PDPs. One major knock against them? They often show items that are sold out, which is major wasted real estate (that'll also likely irritate customers). Also, given most cross-sells are related only to the collection being viewed, Kith is sometimes missing out on opportunities to cross-sell items that go well together that aren't necessarily from the same designer.

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Missed personalization opportunities for

Kith

• Cart page / checkout cross-sells: While the Ajax cart provides cross-sells, Kith's actual cart page (which is really only accessible from checkout) and their checkout both miss out on a prime opportunity to cross-sell customers by offering additional products to top up their order.
• Site customization: The Kith website has a very unique look, feel, and user journey compared to most other ecommerce sites. You get the sense they are leading the curation, not the user, which isn't the most conducive to adding in personalization features. However if Kith was interested, they could tailor things so customers that are primarily interested in their women's collection, for example, will see a featured piece of content from their women's line on the home page, instead of whatever featured 'blog post' the brand is spotlighting. Or their home page navigation could default to the women's section instead of their general news.
• Collections: There doesn't appear to be much rhyme or reason to the sort order of Kith's collections, and browsing the site doesn't change their collection order either. Kith could use browsing behavior signals to curate their collections more elegantly to what a shopper is showing interest in; while curation is a big part of their brand, the collections don't feel curated to any particular buying journey at all right now.

• Menu featured collection customization: Kith's mega menus have different photographic callouts for their various collections. While Kith is treating these the same way a typical ecommerce site might promote collections and drops on the home page, there's room to customize these visual callouts based on what collections or brands a customer has shown interest in during previous visits.
• Recent views: Even if Kith doesn't want to really optimize their site by user, they could at the very least incorporate recently viewed boxes to make it easier for customers to get through a site that's a little cumbersome to navigate otherwise.

Conclusion

Creativity has arguably been the key to Kith's success to date, between their unique weekly drop program and collaborations to the specific style point of view their house brand and curated lines have. But form and function shouldn't be pushed too far to the wayside in favor of style.

Kith is missing some key functionality that could make their site easier to navigate, and feel more tailored to every individual Kith shopper. Multi-brand retailers like Kith have the opportunity to tap into what collections shoppers are connecting with and tailor their shopping experience accordingly.  

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