Business Challenges

In addition to its retail clothing business, Men’s Wearhouse is the largest supplier of rental tuxedos in the U.S. In fiscal year 2010, tuxedo rental services accounted for just over 17 percent of net sales. Each store has personnel trained to properly select and fit tuxedos, which are shipped to stores from distribution centers.

The company acquired After Hours Formalwear, and its partnership with David’s Bridal, in 2006. With leads from the After Hours acquisition, the David’s Bridal partnership, and the 1000+ bridal shows attended by the tuxedo rental sales team, Men’s Wearhouse wanted to create a centralized process to manage leads and set appointments for in-store tuxedo fittings. “Back then, we were not proactively contacting leads in a consistent manner,” explains Scott Stagner, IT Program Manager for Men’s Wearhouse. “Some of the individual stores were doing things on their own, and, therefore, we might do something in one market and not another. There wasn’t any standard process in place for reaching out to all these leads.”

Although After Hours had a homegrown system for lead tracking, it could not scale when the companies merged. At that point, Men’s Wearhouse began looking for CRM solutions that could support an outbound call center, tracking interactions and appointments with customers.

The Solution

Men’s Wearhouse quickly realized that nothing off the shelf would precisely fit the CRM requirements of the tuxedo rental business. It wanted something easy to use and manage that could be configured to the company’s business processes. “Some applications had features we wanted, but many had no mechanism to create functionality that would support our business,” Stagner notes. “We found that a lot of the applications we might have selected would require us to change our processes.” After narrowing the possible choices to a short list, Men’s Wearhouse selected Sugar for an on-premise deployment. “We started looking at solutions in April of 2007 and went live with Sugar in December of that year,” he recalls.

To start, the company worked directly with SugarCRM to deploy its solution. Early on, Men’s Wearhouse primarily used Sugar to track its contacts with prospective brides who were interested in tuxedos for their bridal parties. Initial customizations included disabling some functions to make it easier for users to pick up quickly. Several years later when the company upgraded to Sugar 6, Men’s Wearhouse engaged SugarCRM Gold Partner Epicom. Epicom ensured that all the prior customizations were upgrade safe and added other functionality, including a custom prom view, campaign module, and appointment scheduler module. Sugar is also integrated with the tuxedo rental application used by the stores. “We look at IT as providing customer service for our internal customers, primarily the call center and the marketing groups,” continues Stagner. “And serving their needs is what drives changes to Sugar.”

Business Benefits

With the launch of the Men’s Wearhouse outbound call center, Sugar anchors an efficient, disciplined process for tracking, managing, and nurturing tuxedo rental leads. The solution has also increased the number of selection and fitting appointments that can be set, while improving communication between marketing, the call center, and the stores.

...improving communication between marketing, the call center, and the retail stores.

The relationship with Epicom has proved equally positive. “The great thing about Epicom was that they really know the product,” says Keith Ransom, Sr. Developer for Men’s Wearhouse. “If I have an idea, they can tell me exactly the best way to do it in Sugar. And that has made the process extremely fast and seamless.”

“With the architecture we’ve set up in Sugar and the work we’ve done with Epicom, we can add new functionality in days rather than weeks,” concludes Stagner. “We’re confident that with Sugar and Epicom we can get what we need to support the business implemented in a short time.”

 

Company Profile

Headquarters: Houston, Texas

Founded: 1973

Company Description: Men’s Wearhouse is one of North America’s largest specialty retailers of men’s apparel with 1,166 stores.

Website: www.menswearhouse.com

Solution: Sugar Enterprise

Solution Partner: Epicom

 

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