Case Study: G-Star RAW Elevates Customer Experience & Drives More Traffic with Yext

Fueled by its hardcore denim roots, Dutch denim brand G-Star RAW continues to buck trends and challenge conventions through a constant drive for innovation. With a recent shift from a wholesale and franchising model to a retail-focused setup, the denim brand's digital strategy required a robust solution to underpin this transition.

The brand unwaveringly focuses on ensuring the best experience for its customers, some of whom have been loyal to the G-Star RAW brand for decades.

"We are constantly asking ourselves 'what do they want?', 'what do they expect from G-Star?' and 'How do we connect with them most effectively?'" says Chiara Klamp, Head of Global Omnichannel. "We need to ensure that our customers are able to interact with our brand in the most seamless and frictionless way."

To drive discoverability, G-Star RAW relies on Yext to update its business information with over 150 publishers. "When we worked with franchise partners, a lot of our data was uploaded by third parties. There was a lot of inconsistency in our business information," Klamp says. By perfecting its business listings, in the 34 months since launch in December 2016, G-Star RAW has driven over 1.5 million clicks to its listings while experiencing a year over year growth rate in clicks of 16%.

Yext allows G-Star RAW to manage the information for over 350 locations across 39 countries from one place. Through Yext, the brand was able to make 324,000 location listing updates.

"We needed to achieve operational excellence. The teams were having to make manual updates across platforms and Yext helped us to save a lot of time and resources" Klamp says.

G-Star RAW has also used Yext to pull in over 19,000 reviews to gain a holistic view of what their customers were saying. "We take that customer feedback to make real improvements and have an instant impact on their experience," Klamp explains.

In the 34 months since its launch in December 2016, G-Star RAW has driven over 1.5M clicks to its listings and experienced a 16% year-over-year growth rate.

This included 14% year-over-year growth in direction clicks, 19% year-over-year growth in website clicks, and 24% year-over-year growth in phone call clicks.

In the 34 months since its launch, G-Star RAW has optimized for and achieved sustained and increased visibility on the Google Search Engine Results Page; 58% of search queries the company appears in have been unbranded.

Since launch, Yext has pulled in nearly 19.3k reviews from G-Star RAW listings, providing visibility into brand reputation across publishers over time.

G-Star RAW manages 370 stores across 39 different countries with Yext.

Enhancing operational efficiency with Yext has allowed G-Star RAW to continue to innovate in the denim space.

"There have been dramatic changes in the retail landscape in recent years, and we needed to move quickly to harness the change in consumer behavior," Klamp says. "'Near me' mobile and third-party searches are becoming more and more prevalent. We use Yext to update our information everywhere and to boost our discoverability for local search."

With sustained discoverability, innovation, and customer-centricity top of mind for G-Star RAW, the partnership continues to deliver results. "We are taking steps to become a completely customer-centric organization, and Yext plays a key role in that," Klamp says. "As we continue to scale up the use of Yext, I really believe that it will be possible for us to accelerate the growth that we've seen."