At a recent Plinc breakfast briefing, senior retail leaders joined Steven Moriarty, Head of Customer Data and Insight at Crew Clothing, to hear first-hand how Crew is making customer-first marketing a reality.
Steven shared Crew’s journey — from overcoming fragmented data and disconnected systems to creating a real-time, operational customer view that drives smarter marketing, stronger retention, and sustainable growth.
This Strategic Debrief captures the key lessons, challenges, and practical strategies Crew used to turn ambition into measurable impact — and explores the critical role that strong data foundations, agile insight, and smarter targeting play in accelerating customer-centric transformation.
Strategic Debrief
Making Customer-First a Reality at Crew Clothing: Strategies Driving Growth and Retention Gains
1. The Ambition to Become Data-Driven — and the Challenges Along the Way
Crew Clothing’s ambition to become customer-first wasn’t the result of a top-down directive — it was driven by the need to solve real, everyday challenges faced across the business.
Fragmented reports. Siloed data. Limited customer insight. Disconnected execution across channels.
Critically, when stakeholders came together to map these challenges, the real need became clear:
It wasn’t simply a marketing challenge — it was a deeper need to take control of customer data and translate insight into commercial action.
While a CDP was often discussed, Crew’s leadership understood success would require more than technology installation. It would take a combination of strong data foundations, agile activation capability, and cultural change to truly embed customer-first thinking across the business.
“There were lots of micro-problems. When you put them together, the solution became a customer-first strategy.” — Steven Moriarty, Crew Clothing
Strategic Principle:
Anchor your strategy in solving real business problems — not just buying technology.
2. Laying the Foundations: Building a Complete Operational Customer View
Crew’s first major move was to build a complete, operational view of their customers — bringing together transactional, behavioural, product, store, and finance data into a single, unified platform.
To support this, Crew selected Plinc’s Unilyze platform — a customer data platform designed for both insight and activation — as the foundation for their new operational customer environment.
Unilyze enabled Crew to:
- Consolidate data at customer level — not just by channel or campaign.
- Achieve low-latency data access for faster insight generation and decision-making.
- Preserve historical depth — integrating five years of behavioural and transactional data to strengthen strategic analysis and future planning.
Importantly, Unilyze’s design meant Crew could move quickly without heavily relying on internal technical teams — allowing them to onboard and operationalise their data with minimal disruption.
“Old tales spun from past reports and considered gospel — when you have new data points, they create new truths powered by fresh insights.” — Steven Moriarty
By operationalising live customer data, Crew could challenge outdated assumptions, validate real performance drivers, and prioritise high-impact datasets like digital browsing behaviour early — delivering practical quick wins that built momentum for wider transformation.
Strategic Principle:
Build a complete operational view — using practical, holistic data integration to drive real-world customer understanding.
3. Unlocking Agility: Democratise Data and Drive Insight to Action
With strong data foundations in place, Crew’s next priority was to unlock agility — enabling technical and non-technical teams across marketing, product, store, CX, and leadership to access, explore, and act on customer insights independently.
To support this, Plinc equipped Crew with two integrated capabilities:
- Plinc’s Customer Dashboards — interactive, self-serve portals giving teams real-time access to customer KPIs, behavioural trends, and segmentation insights, all from a single, consistent source of truth.
- Apteco Marketing Cloud, the audience tool within Unilyze, allowing marketers to easily build, analyse, and activate customer segments without needing technical skills — speeding up campaign planning and execution.
Both sat atop the same single source of truth, ensuring that dashboards, audience builds, and SQL queries would always match.
“When you democratise data, you move from a world where no one has any information — and everything is gut feel — to a place where everyone has access to data. At that point, it’s not fiction anymore, but it’s not quite fact either. It’s like ‘based on a true story.’ Everyone starts pulling their own version from the numbers. That’s why you still need analysts — to step in, pull it all together, and make sure the business is working from one true version, not a thousand different interpretations.” — Steven Moriarty
To maintain strategic coherence, Crew invested in analysts to guide interpretation, preventing fragmented storytelling across departments.
Strategic Principle:
Democratise data access — but guide interpretation to ensure the business works from a true story, not fragmented versions.
4. Proving Value: The Power of Incremental Measurement
As their campaign activity scaled, Crew needed a more rigorous way to prove marketing effectiveness — moving beyond surface metrics to understand what was truly driving value.
To support this shift, Crew deployed Plinc’s Campaign Analyzer — a cross-channel reporting tool that benchmarks campaign performance against untreated audiences, automatically calculating uplift and isolating incremental impact.
This new rigour allowed Crew to:
- Validate which activities were generating sustainable customer value.
- Optimise marketing spend based on measurable business outcomes.
- Build stronger commercial narratives internally — showing not just activity, but contribution to long-term growth.
“It’s not just about this week’s ROI — it’s about knowing if your marketing is building sustainable customer value.” — Steven Moriarty
By quantifying real impact, Crew laid the foundation for sharper decision-making — ensuring every investment had to earn its place based on commercial return.
Strategic Principle:
Incremental measurement isn’t a bonus — it’s a baseline for strategic marketing investment.
5. Optimising Targeting: Smarter Segmentation and the Path Toward Predictive Value
With stronger data access and clearer performance measurement, Crew turned their focus to sharpening targeting and audience strategies — driving two major performance improvements.
Efficiency Gains in Direct Mail:
Historically an important but high-cost channel, Crew streamlined their DM programme using more sophisticated behavioural and transactional segmentation.
This reduced mailing volumes and improved targeting — achieving a 50% reduction in channel spend while maintaining incremental profitability.
Savings were reinvested into better-performing acquisition and digital marketing activities.
Expanding the Strategic Focus to Lapsed Reengagement:
Enabled by stronger customer data visibility, Crew identified long-term lapsed customers as an untapped opportunity for growth.
About 18 months ago, they made a strategic shift to actively prioritise reactivation — an area that had not previously been a structured business focus.
As a result, Crew achieved a 30% increase in the re-engagement of long-term lapsed customers, establishing a new key part of their revenue growth strategy beyond pure acquisition.
Building on this success, Crew is now applying predictive models to their marketing strategies — supported by Plinc’s Future Value Model.
This capability predicts each customer’s likelihood to return and projected spend, enabling marketers to spot rising or declining value earlier and act proactively.
While still in early stages of adoption, future value thinking is already helping Crew plan more strategically — protecting retention, optimising spend, and building longer-term customer relationships.
“Future value is about being proactive, not reactive — about moving before the opportunity is lost.” — Steven Moriarty
Strategic Principle:
Smarter targeting starts with sharper segmentation — and evolves by anticipating value, not just reacting to behaviour.
6. The Personalisation Journey: From Foundations to Future-Proofing
With better audience strategies and predictive models emerging, Crew is now evolving their approach to personalisation — shifting from static segmentation to more dynamic, behaviour-led experiences.
Today:
- Dynamic personalisation informs email and CRM messaging based on customer behaviour, preferences, and value tiers.
- Segments are consistent across channels — from email to paid media — reducing siloes and improving customer experience.
Looking ahead:
- Website personalisation initiatives are underway, with an emphasis on consistency across touchpoints.
- Greater automation and AI-driven audience modelling will enable more scalable, adaptive personalisation.
“AI won’t replace experience — but it can streamline decision-making and speed up insights.” — Steven Moriarty
Throughout, Crew’s focus remains clear: personalisation must deliver measurable business value, not just enhanced customer experience.
Strategic Principle:
Personalisation excellence is built on strong foundations, continuous iteration, and commercial discipline.
Conclusion
Crew Clothing’s journey shows that becoming truly customer-first isn’t about making one big technology leap — it’s about building the right foundations, enabling teams with the right tools, and continuously adapting strategy based on real insight.
By focusing on operational agility, smarter targeting, and measurable impact, Crew has created a platform for sustainable growth — and a model many retailers can learn from as they look to turn customer ambition into commercial reality.
To find out how Plinc helps brands like Crew Clothing turn customer data into measurable growth, get in touch with our team.
