The company
Skincare brand fresh harnesses nature’s potency from around the world to awaken the senses and transform the skin. The brand was founded in 1991 by Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg, creative visionaries driven by their curiosity about natural, time-honored remedies and extraordinary experiences for the skin. An LVMH Maison since 2000, fresh is now a global company based in New York offering skincare, lip care, and fragrance in over 25 countries.
Fresh has been a success story in the retail space for the past 3 decades, with its products stocked in beauty retailers, department stores, and standalone boutiques.
As the business grows, direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce expansion is top of mind. The goal now is to bring the same level of customer experience and brand desirability from its physical stores into the digital realm.
The challenge
As fresh focused its efforts on reinforcing its digital expansion, the ecommerce team needed to deliver the customer-centric experiences the company's online audience truly desired.
Traditional analytics tools helped them understand what happened on their website—but this was only half the puzzle. Numbers alone didn’t provide insight into real user behaviors, journeys, and experiences.
When Google Analytics revealed unexpected trends in critical metrics during product launches and campaigns, the team needed a way to know what customers were experiencing on their site. They also needed an additional layer of qualitative insights when conducting A/B tests or conversion rate optimization (CRO) audits.
And that's where Contentsquare came in.
For me, Contentsquare’s biggest impact is making all our markets more data-driven. This is the most important thing to us: ensuring we take decisions based on data. Contentsquare educates our markets and ecommerce leaders about the value of relying on data.
The solution
Geraldine and her team rely on Contentsquare’s all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform to understand real user behaviors and optimize user experience (UX).
Using Contentsquare, the team has been able to find and fix numerous issues negatively impacting the customer journey, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Over time, the platform has proven itself to be an invaluable to the team in 3 key ways.
1. Increasing add-to-cart rate for new products
As fresh grows, new products are continuously added to its line. Gathering data from each product launch helps the team understand why some new products outperform others and optimize pages based on these insights.
When fresh launched a new skincare product online, Google Analytics data showed that its add-to-cart rate was significantly lower than average, impacting conversions.
The ecommerce team needed additional context. Using Contentsquare, they team discovered the exit rate on this particular product page was higher than expected. Additionally, Contentsquare showed that many users would jump back and forth between the product page and the product listing page, which displayed all the products in a specific category.
The team used Contentsquare to confirm that this puzzling behavior wasn’t present on other product pages—and used these insights to get buy-in for investigating further and troubleshooting the issue.
In order to understand if a product is working well or not, Contentsquare helps us deep-dive into why people are buying this product or not compared to another.
2. Identifying and optimizing critical areas of the customer journey
The team’s mission to build a more intuitive ecommerce journey for their customers means they’re constantly finding new ways to optimize.
Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability (with its unique sunburst visualization) gives them an instant, bird’s-eye overview of how users navigate through the fresh website.
At a glance, they can see where users bounce, exit, or loop, enabling them to identify key areas for improvement.
Using Contentsquare’s Heatmaps capability makes it easy for the team to analyze and understand the visitor behavior on individual pages within the journey—showing them where users click, scroll, and hover.
These capabilities have led the team to dozens of simple yet impactful discoveries—for example, homepage content that's being overlooked or unnecessary menu items causing confusion.
The team uses these insights to inform homepage hierarchy, remove redundant information, and streamline the overall customer journey.
![[Visual] ab test heatmaps](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/71Feljv3nwR0ng3PEiPGEG/c5c4f991ef679e660e08970edb2a894a/ab_test_heatmaps.png?w=3840&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
With the sunburst journey analysis, you have the possibility to really dive deep into all the steps and better understand the customer journey. And Contentsquare can also help us to know which content we push—for example, on the homepage, we use Heatmaps to see which content is performing the best, where people click, and where they do not click.
3. Improving collaboration across teams and markets
Contentsquare's Experience Analytics has been a game-changer for the team, enabling them to learn from their consumers and foster a culture of customer-centricity across teams, functions, and markets.
Contentsquare’s visual tools help fresh's 9 ecommerce locales stay aligned and consistent when it matters most.
A recent example was when the team conducted a homepage analysis across the regions during a high-traffic holiday season. Contentsquare data showed that content at the bottom of the homepage in some countries wasn't being clicked on compared to other regions' homepages. This finding prompted those regional teams to declutter their pages and revert to the more effective, user-friendly homepage hierarchy the other teams were using.
By sharing this data insight cross-functionally, the ecommerce team cemented Contentsquare as an invaluable part of its tech stack.
During the high-traffic holiday season, some of our ecommerce regions had 3 content slots on their website homepage, while others had 7. We did an analysis on the countries with more content slots, and realized that 3 out of 7 didn't provide any revenue. That’s how we came to the conclusion to cut 3 of them and streamline the customer journey.
The results
At a time when fresh’s ecommerce growth matters more than ever, Contentsquare is helping the ecommerce team get the right data to plan A/B tests that will have a notable impact on the company's bottom line.
Instead of looking at what competitors are doing and making changes that align with ‘best practices’, the fresh team charts its own course based on insights from real customers—the most valuable data they have access to.
