If fashion had a yearbook, GANNI would definitely win "Most Likely to Be Your New Best (Dressed) Friend." Born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark, GANNI is all about that effortless, Scandi-cool vibe. Think laid-back luxury with a side of playful charm. The brand was founded in 2000, but it really hit its stride when Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup took the reins in 2009. Since then, it's been a whirlwind of success, making waves on the international fashion scene.

Today, GANNI boasts 70 locations around the world, bringing bold styles in women's apparel and accessories to both casual shoppers and ardent acolytes (perhaps you've heard the term GANNI Girl?) alike. And along their journey, they've brought Endear along to help manage and execute their customer outreach.

The headline result: a 28% increase in average order value (AOV), which GANNI links most directly to its Endear outreach. In this GANNI case study, you'll get the full interview with the person who runs the program, the exact clienteling tactics behind that number, and a playbook you can put to work in your own stores. Let's start with the results at a glance.

Key takeaways:

• Run outreach from the store, by associates who know the customer, instead of as another marketing blast.
• Back-in-stock texts on best sellers are service and direct sales at the same time.
• Pair a suggested best seller with a payment link so the client can buy straight from the message.
• Borrow ecommerce triggers like abandoned-basket and "notify me" reminders for your store clients.
• Watch days-to-convert and adjust send days: GANNI moved sends earlier in the week to secure weekend traffic.

GANNI case study at a glance

(Quick note, because we see the search: Endear isn't a clothing label. We're the clienteling and retail CRM platform behind fashion brands like GANNI, helping their store teams build relationships that turn into repeat sales.)

How did GANNI increase average order value by 28%?

GANNI's store teams used Endear to reach out personally to customers, mostly by text. They alerted clients when cult best sellers came back in stock, sent pictures of similar products with a direct payment link, adapted abandoned-basket reminders for store clients, and used reporting to time sends earlier in the week.

None of those tactics is exotic on its own. What made the difference was running them from the store, by associates who know the customer, instead of as another anonymous marketing blast. Here's the playbook, pulled straight from the interview below:

1. Pick one tool every store uses. GANNI wanted a single platform that all of its stores could use to reach out to customers, and one it could get running within a month or two.
2. Treat outreach as service, not promotion. The goal was to make sure GANNI's service "lived outside our doors as well, not just on the sales floor."
3. Lead with the products customers already crave. Back-in-stock messages on hype items like leopard jeans and ballerinas are, in Sophia's words, "not just great service it's also direct sales."
4. Suggest the next best seller, with a way to buy. Associates send a picture of a similar best seller (a bag, say) plus a payment link, which Sophia calls "key."
5. Borrow ecommerce triggers for the store. GANNI adapted abandoned-cart and "notify me" style reminders for the store clients most inclined to buy higher-end products.
6. Let the data set the send schedule. Reply rate, conversion rate and average days-to-convert showed that Thursday sends took about seven days to convert, so teams moved outreach earlier in the week to secure weekend traffic.

Want to see what those steps look like with your own customer data? We'll get to how you can run this playbook today. First, the story in Sophia's own words.

Inside the interview: Sophia Wood on GANNI's clienteling program

We had a chat with Sophia Wood, Global Retail Excellence Manager at GANNI, about the brand and how they use Endear in their day-to-day.

Hi Sophia! Tell us, what does a "Global Retail Excellence" manager do?

Just about everything but operations and opening stores, really. Collection training, onboarding, anything to make the sales teams jobs easier. I have a part in driving traffic and optimizing the sales process. Even though we have 70 stores around the world, it's a relatively small management team. There's one operations manager, two people opening stores, and me.

Can you tell us what makes a GANNI Girl?

The GANNI Girl is not one single polished persona - it's a plural. GANNI Girls is a movement, a mindset and an attitude, that isn't constricted to binary genders.These people march to the beat of their own drum. They've become a fiercely independent and confident community, whose personal style is a form of self-expression. It's a lifestyle rather than a sense of style. They wear the dress, it doesn't wear them.

We know "Responsibility" is a big ethos of GANNI. Tell us a little about what that means.

The figures below come from GANNI's 2023 Responsibility Report.

GANNI is a B Corp certified company, on a journey to become the most responsible version of itself. They believe it's a moral obligation to do better every day, which has led the brand to collaborate with its supply chain on reducing its emissions as part of GANNI's carbon insetting scheme. The brand publishes an annual Responsibility Report to publicly share its progress and has committed to a 50% absolute carbon reduction by 2027 vs a 2021 baseline.

As part of the 2023 report GANNI reported a 7% absolute reduction in carbon emissions from the 2021 baseline, marking significant progress in its environmental impact, considering the brand's average annual financial growth rate of 18% since 2021. As part of the brand's ongoing endeavors to choose certified and innovative fabrics, GANNI is committed to having 100% of collections made from certified recycled, organic, or preferred materials in the future.

In 2023 GANNI achieved its goal of phasing out all virgin leather from all coming RTW shoes and accessories collections. GANNI currently has a 100% product traceability on Tier 1 suppliers and subcontractors and aims to achieve visibility across GANNI's full supply chain by 2025.

That's truly wonderful to hear. So tell us about how GANNI came to Endear.

We wanted to find one tool that all our stores could use to reach out to customers. We had to be agile, and I wanted something that would be up and running within a month or two. We researched other CRM tools but kept coming back to Endear. I loved the creative Stories tool and knew our teams would love it too as they love to share curated products in their outreach!

And what problem were you trying to solve with Endear?

We wanted to provide a service to customers, to elevate their experience and make sure the service lived outside our doors as well, not just on the sales floor. When I started working in retail 16 years ago, it was a bit boring! You're always just standing in the store and waiting for customers to come in. That retail experience wasn't very proactive, because if customers didn't come in, there wasn't anything to do.

Then we started doing more omnichannel and we saw more action. We could actually drive traffic into the store. Implementing Endear's CRM tool seemed like the perfect next step, it gave our teams a way to actively drive that traffic into our stores. And quality traffic at that.

Just doing omnichannel is great for blurring the lines between ecommerce and retail, but it often wouldn't send that quality traffic we were looking for. Customers are coming, but they're not necessarily staying. We learned that if you personally reach out as a service to them, they stay.

See what the hype is all about. If your associates are still waiting for customers to walk in, request a demo and we'll show you how GANNI-style outreach works with your own POS and ecommerce data.

Engaging with customers is huge for loyalty. What features do your team use the most for engagement?

We mostly send text messages through Endear. Then we use your reporting to watch the reply rate, conversion rate, and average days-to-convert. We use these metrics to help our teams strategize around when to send out messages, especially around weekends.

Over a weekend?

We noticed that when we would send messages on Thursday, the average days-to-convert went up to seven days. So we decided to send earlier in the week to secure traffic on the weekend.

That's a big win! What other wins have you seen using Endear for outreach?

Wow that's really incredible actually.

We've noticed with Endear how customers gravitate towards our best seller items, leopard jeans and ballerinas for example, there's a sense of urgency and hype attached to these products, reaching out to customers when these items are back in stock is not just great service it's also direct sales. We also know that our customers might want other similar best selling products. So our team will send them a picture of, say, a bag and include a payment link – which is key. Sending a direct payment link helps make the conversion happen.

The customers we reach out to are more inclined to buy the higher-end products. So using Endear, we adapt the auto-emails that remind them about abandoned carts: "hey, you forgot this. Are you still thinking about this product? We've got one left." By using concepts we know from ecommerce's "abandoned basket" and "notify me" function, we've seen a lift in conversion too.

How has been your experience working with Endear's team?

I have never experienced anything like how the Endear team has been working with me, I feel very special as a customer. [Our Sales Rep] Ashley is great, she feels like a friend. [Our Account Manager] Davis is also the most helpful person I've ever met. Everyone is super nice.

When we were evaluating one of your competitors, we had to sign an NDA just to watch a demo! It made the meeting feel really intense. We like the more casual, partnership and friendly feel of Endear.

Plus it's been so nice to work with a team where if there isn't already a certain feature we want, they'll say "let me try to find a work around" and they do.

Would you recommend Endear to other brands in your space?

I would and I have recommended you to a lot of brands. You should be getting a call from a few brands in Denmark soon…

What is clienteling, and why does it raise average order value?

Clienteling is the practice of store associates building one-to-one relationships with customers, using purchase history, preferences and notes to reach out with personal recommendations. It raises average order value because the associate suggests products the customer already wants, often higher-end or complementary pieces, at the right moment.

GANNI's results are a textbook example. Look at what actually moved AOV in Sophia's answers:

• Relevance beats reach. A back-in-stock text about the leopard jeans a client already loves lands very differently from a sitewide promo email.
• The associate adds the second item. Sending "a picture of, say, a bag" alongside a best seller is the in-store equivalent of a stylist pulling an extra piece into the fitting room.
• The most engaged clients buy up. Sophia notes that "the customers we reach out to are more inclined to buy the higher-end products," so personal outreach naturally skews the basket upward.
• Friction disappears. A payment link turns "I love that" into an order without waiting for the next store visit.

If you want the wider research picture, we've rounded up 25 clienteling statistics retailers need to know, including how clienteled customers spend compared with everyone else.

Clienteling vs. CRM: what's the difference?

A CRM stores customer data. Clienteling is what your associates do with it. A retail CRM like Endear holds the profile (purchases across stores and online, sizes, preferences, notes), and the clienteling workflow is the associate using that profile to send the right message to the right person. GANNI needed both: one shared customer view across 70 locations, and a simple way for each associate to act on it.

What is average order value (AOV) in retail?

Average order value is the average amount a customer spends per transaction. To calculate it, divide total revenue by the number of orders over the same period. For example, $50,000 in revenue across 250 orders gives you an AOV of $200.

AOV matters because it grows revenue without needing more foot traffic or more ad spend. That's exactly why Sophia calls it the metric "most directly linked to Endear efforts": clienteling doesn't just bring people through the door, it changes what they buy once they're there. (Traffic is lovely. Traffic that buys the bag and the jeans is lovelier.)

A few AOV questions come up often:

• Is AOV a KPI? Yes. For most retailers it sits alongside conversion rate, sales per square foot and customer retention as a core store KPI.
• What does a high AOV mean? Customers are buying more items, higher-priced items, or both per visit. It often signals strong associate recommendations and good product adjacency.
• How is increasing AOV different from increasing sales? Sales can rise because more people buy. AOV rises only when each purchase gets bigger, which makes it a cleaner read on how well your team is selling.

How to use Endear to increase AOV and keep VIP customers coming back

GANNI built its program on text outreach, Stories and reporting. The same foundations are there for you, and Endear has added tools since that make the playbook easier to run across every store (not just the ones with your star associates).

1. Start with a single customer view. Connect your POS and ecommerce platform through Endear's integrations (including Shopify) so every associate sees a client's full purchase history, wherever they shopped.
2. Let AI find today's best opportunities. The AI Opportunity Engine surfaces a daily queue of high-intent customers, like the client whose favorite style just came back in stock, and drafts a brand-aligned message your associate reviews and edits before sending. One specialty retailer using it went from 60 outreach messages a week to 360 within six weeks, without adding headcount, and earned $35 in attributed revenue for every $1 spent on actioned opportunities.
3. Capture what happens on the floor. With AI Notetaker, associates log fit notes, wish-list pieces and follow-ups by voice, typing or photo, and it syncs to the customer profile. That's the context behind a "we've got one left" message that actually lands.
4. Curate, don't blast. Use Shoppable Stories to send a small edit of new arrivals or best sellers a client can shop directly, just as GANNI's teams love to share curated products in their outreach.
5. Automate the reminders. Set up Campaigns for back-in-stock, abandoned-basket style nudges and VIP moments across email, SMS and WhatsApp, with replies landing in one inbox.
6. Turn VIPs into appointments. Invite your top clients to book time with their favorite associate using Appointments. Dedicated time is where the second and third items get added to the basket.
7. Measure, then adjust your timing. Track reply rate, conversion rate and days-to-convert in Insights, then shift your send days the way GANNI did.

Looking for more proof from brands like yours? See how UNTUCKit boosted conversions with Endear SalesChat, how FRAME tripled its clienteling revenue, or browse more Endear customer stories and our clienteling tools for apparel brands.

Frequently asked questions

Where does GANNI come from?

GANNI comes from Copenhagen, Denmark. The brand was founded in 2000 and hit its stride after Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup took over in 2009, growing into an international fashion brand known for its Scandi-cool, playful style.

Who owns GANNI?

Private equity firm L Catterton acquired a 51% stake in GANNI in 2017, with the Reffstrups retaining the remaining ownership, according to GANNI's Wikipedia entry.

Is GANNI a luxury brand?

GANNI sits in contemporary fashion with a "laid-back luxury" feel: bold, playful women's apparel and accessories rather than traditional heritage luxury. It is also a B Corp certified company.

What features did GANNI use in Endear?

GANNI's teams mostly send text messages through Endear, use the Stories tool to share curated products, and rely on Endear's reporting to track reply rate, conversion rate and average days-to-convert.

How long did it take GANNI to get Endear running?

Sophia's brief was agility: she wanted a tool that would be "up and running within a month or two," and GANNI kept coming back to Endear after researching other CRM tools.

What Endear features help increase AOV and retain VIP customers?

The biggest levers are the AI Opportunity Engine (a daily queue of high-intent customers with draft messages), AI Notetaker (in-store context captured automatically), Shoppable Stories, automated Campaigns, Appointments for VIPs, and Insights to measure what's working.

Ready to write your own AOV story?

GANNI didn't need a bigger marketing budget to grow order value. It needed every store to reach out personally, with the right product, at the right time, and a way to see what was working. That's clienteling in a sentence.

If you're ready to turn your associates into your strongest sales channel, request a demo and we'll show you how Endear can do the same for your stores.