2026, eTail Palm Springs Room G 26 Day 2_Keynote_ How The North Face scales the personalization mountain

Announcer: We are going to move right along into our next piece of content, which is a keynote called How The North Face Scales the Personalization Mountain. Very nice there. Please welcome to the stage Mihail Dorri, who's the director of AI innovation and digital marketing for Optimizely, and Anna Downes, who's the digital personalization manager for The North Face.

Welcome.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: We're just gonna sit in the middle. Is that okay? Yeah. In the middle? Yeah, okay. We could have sat on opposite ends, that would've been fun. So hi. We're gonna talk to you a little bit about personalization, and I'm here with The North Face with Anna, and I give you a little... That's us. There you go. And we as Optimizely, if you have- haven't heard of us as a company before, we're very big in the AB testing and personalization space.

So you make changes to your website or your experience or, like The North Face to their D2C commerce site. And you can change the experience and measure results based on that or target it by specific audiences. And I do that for Optimizely. That's the easiest way of thinking about it. I will give you the same joke that I always give because, please laugh.

We're like a customer of ourselves. We're the best and worst customer because we use everything, but we pay for nothing Thank you for laughing, the one person in the back. So I'm here with Anna Downes, and she runs the personalization program at The North Face. So maybe you can explain a little bit about you, yourself and your program.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. Hi, I'm Anna. I am the digital personalization manager for The North Face. So what that means is I manage all of our onsite optimization programs, which includes A/B testing, any conversion optimizations we're trying to run, and then also really getting into that personalization and figuring out how do we get to that one-to-one personalization on site.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: And I think you're in the same space that a lot of our customers are in, right? It's funny, we have a booth out here, and a lot of people come up and they say, "Hey, we know there's a lot of software and solutions to doing personalization," but everybody says they wanna be doing more personalization.

They expect more. We actually did research with customers, and 67% of customers, like actual visitors to site, say that they expect personalization. But almost the majority of marketers say that they're not doing enough and they don't feel that they're doing enough personalization, and that it's hard to pull off.

So maybe you explain a little bit what the customer journey looks like for North Face and how personalization fits in with that.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. So North Face is super interesting 'cause we have such a wide customer base. So we have everyone from your most extreme athletes who are summiting some of the most demanding mountains in the world, to your average urban explorer who's just navigating a city.

And so we serve pretty much everyone in between that, which means also our product catalog is quite big, and it also has everything from logo tees, sun wear, all the way to extreme mountaineering kits. And so our real challenge that we're trying to solve every day is how do we show- The right product to the right customer, and really tell a content story that it's actually gonna speak to them when they come onto our site.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Yeah, that makes sense because you have a huge breadth of customer set, right? Anything from, the casual, like we have people here probably wearing hats and bags and things from The North Face all the way to the more professionals, right?

Do you feel like that experience for people shopping is very different between those two customer sets?

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah, so it's extremely different. They're looking for different levels of details on the product. If you're, hoping to have a kit that will bring you up Everest, you wanna know all the technical specs of it. You wanna know how warm it'll keep you. However, if you're just getting a jacket to wear around the city, you're not, usually not interested in that much detail.

So we're really trying to balance that, how do we show the right level of info for the right products for the right people?

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: And where do you feel like if I take a look at these experiences, like these are all the parts, right? That we feel we can have a difference in the experience for people.

Some people think about recommendations, right? Showing the right product at the right time. Some of it can be, a personalized experience when you actually get to the site. So like my easiest example's also al- always like the gendered homepage, right? Male versus female clothing- ... showing that stuff.

How detailed do you go into that and how high level... what is the most helpful for people you find-

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah, so I think- ... in that experience? What's been super interesting is when we have a static homepage- ... story it's very clear that no longer serves our customer base. We've seen pretty extreme growth coming from a lot of like social channels, email marketing, SMS, you name it.

And all of those different customers have a different level of knowledge and a different story that they're looking for, a different exploration essentially that they're trying to get to. And so when we're actually having that static content on site, we are seeing increased bounce rates, we're seeing funnel drop-offs.

And so what we've really learned is that the traditional static site, it doesn't serve what the customer's looking for anymore. I think to your point of 67% of people looking for a personalized experience, like it's very true. When you don't have that dynamic site, you do see the drop-offs. And so where we're really trying to focus is having our content line up with where people come from in terms of their geolocation, their ads they've clicked on, what we can know about them, and then also in session what we can know about them.

So what products have they looked at? Where have they browsed? And how can we really yeah, change what's happening in session? I think probably similar to a lot of other companies, most people buy a jacket once a year max. So we don't have people coming back every week, every month even. So it's really that challenge of figuring out how do we actually know what their intent is, and then how can we in turn change that to optimizing their site experience.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: And how do you feel like in terms of prioritization, right? 'Cause the huge chunk of that is y- we as marketers always, this is how I frame it to people we work with internally too, we run our own personalization program, is w- we always approach things from campaigns. "Oh, let's do a campaign, and then we'll personalize for that campaign.

If you come back, you'll see more of that campaign." But I tend to find if I look at the actual numbers, the highest performing ones is where we actually look at the data first, and we say, "Okay, what data do we have access to?" Can be anything as simple as time of day, like you said, channel people came from, maybe the keyword that they used to see an ad, and how do I bring that messaging into the site?

So where do you see those signals and different things coming from and what is most impactful for The North Face?

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. So I think we... There's a few signals that are probably most important to us, but I think we just have such a large portion of traffic that is really coming in from those social and paid channels right now, that seems to be the most impactful to date.

Those are usually the customers who are searching for something slightly relevant, but they, maybe they aren't familiar with our whole product catalog. And so maybe they searched for a puffer jacket, but they don't know we have 20 different puffer jackets. So how are we taking what they've searched, what they've interacted with prior to getting onto our site, and then actually leveraging that product that's helpful?

So that... I would say paid social has been a huge focus for us. And then the other is once we have people signed up for- story messaging that experience across the site and throughout the purchase journey.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Interesting. Yeah. I think we structured it on this slide in the same way that we like to think about it. So it's one to many, one to few, one to one. And everyone we always talk to, if we say, "You wanna do personalization," they say, "We wanna get to the one-to-one."

Right? That's what we feel is the best experience for people. If you go to a site, you use an app, and it just says, "Hi Anna," "Here's the specific thing that you want." The interesting part is, a lot of people don't like the creep factor of some of that. It's actually showing up and immediately feeling okay, you're trying to talk to me as a specific persona in your system.

Yet if we think about it more as, can we actually find what the intent is that people have, what are they trying to do, and how do we service that faster the experience tends to improve, and people actually really like that personalized experience. So I like that you guys are also thinking about bringing back that loyalty information, what they have done before, to actually influence future decisions.

'Cause people are already committed to the brand, that's a very different kind of purchase- than it is to not do that. I can give you a specific example of a test that we've run with a different customer. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, has a, Sorry, it's not the Wall Street Journal.

It's a charity program. I forget what the name of , the company was. They actually had a button on their site about donations, and they actually found that the first time that people came to the site and they just are trying to commit to the cause, that's a very different driver from doing a repeat donation.

So the first time you might need to give people an incentive. "Here's a free thing we can give you." For The North Face, it might be free shipping, or it might be something like that. Versus if you already purchased with them, you know that the product fits very well, you might not need to say something like that.

The returns become less important because you already know that kind of the brand suits you, you wanna stick with them. Tying that kind of activity back to the actual experience that people have, and then even sharing that across different channels, like bringing that back into email and social and the other platforms, can be really impactful, I think, for the experience.

Is that something that you've also seen work well?

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. And I think I have two good examples of that. But one that, particularly for The North Face, we have a ton of s- retail stores as well as- ... our e-commerce site. And so once we know if someone prefers to shop in store or online, we're actually able to show stores close to them and where we have stock, in-stock items.

And that, just being able to show that a bit more dynamically and leveraging it to the right people has actually helped improve that business quite a bit. The other one that's interesting that you mentioned is the intent of where they're coming from. So we constantly are analyzing data and patterns of how people are coming onto our site, where they're coming from, what are they interacting with.

And we often use like an eyebrow text essentially, to highlight the right product features about those. And we've seen that be super impactful. So if someone's, searching for hiking gear, we can have best for hike show up on our PLP-

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Interesting.

Yeah, I like that, that you're going one click into it and saying, "Okay, why are people actually picking this product?"

And then using that essentially as a driver to improve the experience forward. I think just, you've seen a product, here's more of that same product. We always have the funny example of I bought toilet paper on Amazon, and then it keeps recommending me more toilet paper when I just bought toilet paper.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yes.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Understanding what that customer journey is and how you could further help them on their journey is really helpful, I think, and impactful for people. So if we look at actual things you can change for the experience for customers anything from picking and showing the right product, right?

There's a lot of feeds and a lot of things on your site probably. There's search, there's different ways people navigate on the site, and then actually showing up with the right message and the right driver at the right time. What things are you specifically thinking about for The North Face are, like, the most interesting touch points essentially that you can influence?

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. So I think we spent a lot of our last quarter focused on the product recommendations, which just really tailoring sort of the algorithm to properly show what the right products are. And as I mentioned, most people think of The North Face for the jacket. Once someone's on our site and maybe they were thinking about a jacket, how do we actually show them other products that's gonna help them expand into our larger catalog?

So we spent a lot of Q3 just focused on that and tailoring that algorithm to make sure it's performing the best it can. What was super interesting about that is it's different on different page types, on different product types, and even for different traffic sources. So I would say that has been a huge, hugely impactful initiative for us.

The other is the timely messaging on site has been super, super impactful, particularly during promotional periods. Making sure we're showing an offer that the customer's actually eligible for. I think a lot of times I go onto a site and it's "10% off your first offer." However, I'm already... I've made a purchase on that site before, so that actually isn't eligible for me.

So really making sure we're, like, clarifying our offers throughout the whole journey of the customer so that they know exactly what they're eligible, what they can get, and actually increasing that urgency for them.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: It's the right time at the right place with the right message.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: And all of those things can really make a huge impact.

We're obviously big in A/B testing too, and we see that oftentimes if a test fails, it could literally just be where we actually put the text- ... how we actually make it show up. That is the thing that either triggered someone to do something or not do something. So that's a very interesting insight.

If I actually look at where we are currently, we've been at personalization for 10, 15 years. Every year we come to an event, like eTail, we were here last year with another one of our customers, and we always get the same questions at the booth, right? So why are we talking about personalization now?

Has this not been solved as a technology problem? And if I just speak from my own personal experience, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this as well, a lot of this has been out there. There are CDP platforms, there are platforms that can change the experience, but that last mile execution has been really hard.

How do you actually create the experience that truly feels personal to people and scale up the actual content creation, the optimization, building the experiences? That could be as simple as changing text, but it can also be changing the design and the layout of a page or an app. And those parts have traditionally been really hard.

It's all up to you as a marketer to take that- thought that you have, the hypothesis, as we say. Write out what you think will impact people, and then try to execute on that last part. How have you felt kind of personalization has changed, and why now is a great time to get into it, and how that's impacted you?

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. So everyone's favorite buzzword, but AI is really what is... Today, I think that's really what is pushing us to being able to actually do the true personalization. Historically, our main barriers at North Face have been lack of bandwidth to create content for each variant that we wanna run lack of bandwidth to actually do the analysis to understand what are the segments we should be personalizing for.

What-- how did that perform? Did it do well? Should we keep doing more of that? And so really having the limited bandwidth is where we've run into the most blockers priorly. However, now in a day in-- where AI exists, and you can do a lot of those manual tasks more efficiently it has really opened our eyes.

So what's-- what we've found particularly useful two things. One is we've been using AI a lot to do our anal-analysis and segmentation. And so what we're able to do is actually upload some of our customer data and say, "Hey, our goal is really to increase UPT this week. What are some segments that we should be optimizing that for?"

And then also on top of that is creating the content. So obviously, the whole cr-- content creation process is a long process. And we can have one image, but we can have multiple different versions of text on that image. So how do we dynamically create that copy to actually speak to the different audiences?

Where that would've taken probably multiple copywriters in the past, we can actually have AI help us generate that. It still has to go through the creative review process. However, that just takes out one of those barriers. And then I would say the last piece on the execution that has been super interesting is priorly, we would have to manually build and tell- The website, okay, show this version to this group of people, this version to this group of people.

Where Optimizely has been super helpful is we can have multiple variants, and it is dynamically pushing traffic to the right variant that speaks to that audience.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Yeah. And that's some of our newer technology, for instance, that we launched over the last year called a contextual bandit, where you you can already target by what channel people came from, what time of day it is.

Those things are available. But the problem still was you have to decide what to show those people. You have to manually set up that audience and then create the experience and show it to people. And the feature Anna is describing is essentially saying, "Hey, if you just give me the options of what to show to people, and you tell me what things you think will impact the experience, like time of day or channel, the system will just decide on the fly which one it thinks impacts people most, and then even tell you back in the system, 'Hey, I used time of day in 30% of cases,' or, 'Hey- the weather might be changing. You need that jacket right now. This seems like a big driver for people to want to see this experience." 'Cause the trick is not to just show people more things all of the time. It's to show less and more direct, right? Anything you take out directs people more to that experience.

So I think that's a very interesting way of thinking about it is that the AI doesn't just help you execute faster, but it also helps you improve the quality kind of what you're doing, whether that be QA-ing the actual hypothesis that you set up, helping you build the ex- e- and executing on the actual variant, and then QA-ing it afterwards.

Did you set it up correctly? Are the metrics right? Can it help you relay that back to leadership, for instance? Those are all parts that AI is very good at

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Any thoughts about that? Any additional thoughts?

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: No, I would just say we leverage a lot of Optimizely's out-of-the-box AI tools to do a lot of that.

But what I think also takes for us, why Optimizely has been super impactful for us, is the ability to actually build our own agents on top of that. So in the terms of content creation and those things, we can actually give it our brand guidelines, and it is almost as if it works at The North Face and can really streamline all of its output towards the specific company.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: Wow, seems like you really like this Optimizely company. They must be really great. Yeah. Glad you said it. So if it were just g- maybe you can close us out by giving people some key takeaways that you feel like you've learned by setting up this personalization program. And I'll click on... I d- I only noticed when we got backstage, there's a beautiful little animation here.

Look at this. Wow, look at that.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah, we're summited.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: There we go.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah. So I think I- three takeaways really, but I think the most important thing is really, especially being at something like eTail, there are so many different technological solutions for a lot of these problems, but it's really crucial to first have your strategy in place.

So you can get super excited about technology and what it can do for you, but it- until you have that strategy in place and you can laser focus on what you should be prioritizing and how you can get to your end state it's easy to get caught up in just different tech tools that actually aren't solving the real problems you're facing every day.

And then I think the second one, at North Face, we have a big test and learn culture. We like to test everything, learn everything. And it's not always about having impact in terms of conversion or revenue, but as long as we learn something about our customer and about our site, we count it as a win.

And so really fostering that environment to continue to test and fail fast is something ha- has been super crucial for this program. And then I think the last piece, which I've heard a bunch of people talk about today, but- It's really important to balance your brand with this whole tech AI evolution.

The North Face has such a strong history and such a clear mission to get people outside and out exploring, that we don't want AI to overwrite that. We really wanna work alongside it and have it help enhance our experiences rather than change them completely.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: And that's also where we've seen most of our customers be really successful.

We did a huge study last year where we analyzed 127,000 experiments, and we saw, it, it sounds very strange, but literally customers who built more variants of a test seemed to be more successful. They had higher win rates. They made bigger impacts on their conversion rates. But the hard part is typically when we change an experience, we only have one idea, right?

I wanna change this button from red to blue. I think that's a great idea. But the AI can actually help us stretch those ideas as well. So not just on the execution part, can it build it faster, but also, hey, come up with a unique take or take on the voice of my customer, and then what can you do with this and how can you change the experience?

So I like that you're thinking about this, hey, if we take a step back on this first, look at the program that we're taking and actually take a thoughtful approach to implementing instead of immediately jumping to changing the experience and then iterating from there. So-

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Yeah.

Michiel Dorjee, Director, AI Innovation & Digital Marketing, Optimizely: That's great. Thank you all.

We have a booth out here, so the easiest way to find it is there's a big 700 sign right there, right underneath that sign. If you come by our booth, actually we're giving away some North Face apparel, so you have a be a little, nice little bag and some things. So if you wanna stop by, come by our booth, and thank you so much.

Cool.

Anna Downs, Digital Personalization Manager, The North Face: Thank you, Erin. Thank you.