Laurie Falletta, VP of Ecommerce at Cole Haan, argues that over-personalizing your site is quietly killing your brand story. Average UPT on most sites sits around 1.4, and Laurie makes the case that a merchant's eye, not just an algorithm, is what moves that number.
Behind the Expert
Laurie Falletta has spent more than eighteen years in ecommerce, and merchandising is the through line. She started at Victoria’s Secret when the website was roughly five percent of the business and the catalog was the other ninety-five — a decade there across categories, leading digital while also working back with design as a merchant. She left product deliberately to go deep on digital at Bed Bath & Beyond, learning tech stacks and how a site actually gets built, then returned to it at The Children’s Place leading brand sites and merchandising. Two years at Foot Locker gave her multi-brand experience running footlocker.com for North America. Today she leads ecommerce at Cole Haan — a brand turning one hundred in 2028, built on the first generation of hybrid dress shoes and still described by customers in one word: comfortable.
The Quick Hits
- Over-personalization dilutes the story of the season. A store holds a curated table for the length of a campaign; a site that personalizes every impression collapses toward best sellers.
- What gets suppressed is the interesting half of the assortment — the higher price point, the brighter color, the pattern. You are left with black, white, and neutrals.
- Average UPT on most sites is around 1.4. Moving it takes a merchant’s eye for what genuinely goes together, because “sometimes the machines don’t know that.”
- Draw the line deliberately: don’t hand-merchandise an entire product listing page — that’s what search is for. Do merchandise curated shops, new product, and the trending color that isn’t a best seller yet.
- Personalization is a catalog-size question. Thousands of SKUs need filtering to be usable; a mono-brand needs curation.
- Nobody has cracked fit. Customers spend about thirty seconds on a PDP and don’t read the copy, and fit-tool usage stays low — alt imagery often does more work than either.
- Agentic discovery has no rulebook yet. Reddit and earned articles are among the top sources models pull from, ranking well on Claude tells you nothing about Gemini, and there’s no first position to buy — Falletta isn’t aware of one yet.
The merchant’s eye, and what the algorithm can’t see
Falletta’s answer to what merchandising teaches you sounds less like a marketer and more like a general manager. Understanding the product life cycle — how it gets produced, what it costs, what the minimums are, how much inventory to plan, when it gets marked down and when it holds full price — is what lets her look at a web experience and ask the two questions that matter: what are we leading with, and are we selling it at the right margin?
That grounding shows up in how she talks about promotions. Black Friday, as she puts it, is two months now. Someone who has never carried a margin line can know what gross margin means without having the reflex that says: I can’t sell this below a fifty margin, so this is not the product to lead with. It also shows up in the details that make a page work — a complete-the-look module on the PDP, enriched content that carries the technology in a shoe you can’t pick up and hold.
The sharpest version of the argument is about the cart. Recommendation trays are largely algorithmic now, and Falletta doesn’t want them back by hand. But affinity data is thin exactly where curation matters most.
Where over-personalization starts costing you
Falletta’s line between machine and merchant is precise, and worth copying. Manually merchandising an entire product listing page is not the job — that’s what search is for. Curated shops are the job. So is the new product, the trending color, the fabric you’re featuring in email and social this week: the things a customer can’t find yet because they haven’t earned engagement.
Push personalization past that line and the cost is the story itself. Design hands the team a story for the season. A store brings it to life on a table or a wall and leaves it there for the length of the campaign. A site that re-sorts itself for every visitor has no equivalent of that table.
The specific loss is what she calls the tertiary — and, she notes, that’s often the good stuff. It gets pushed out because it isn’t a best seller yet: the higher price point, the brighter color, the pattern. Optimize hard enough on what customers are already buying and the assortment converges on black, white, and neutrals. Falletta is careful not to make this a universal rule. A retailer with millions of SKUs has to personalize, because otherwise nobody finds anything. Personalization is a catalog-size question. For a mono-brand like Cole Haan, the answer is curation.
Nobody has cracked fit — and the copy isn’t being read
Returns sit squarely inside the merchandising problem, and Falletta is blunt about the constraint everyone designs around and few admit: the average customer spends about thirty seconds on a product detail page and doesn’t read the copy. All the guidance that would prevent a return — size up, runs narrow, oversized fit — is sitting in a block most people skip.
Fit tools haven’t closed the gap either. Some footwear brands see a benefit, some don’t; in her experience usage stays low enough that the tool isn’t the fix. What has worked is less glamorous — carrying fit information in alt imagery rather than a copy block, and building for the moment a store would normally handle. At Victoria’s Secret that meant tools that walked a customer through fitting herself at home, because the in-store fitting simply doesn’t translate.
And some of it is irreducible. Everyone’s foot is different. Customers order two sizes and return one, and no amount of copy stops a return driven by not liking the shoe. Context helps at the margin: a Foot Locker customer already knows their Nike size, while a first-time Cole Haan customer has nothing to anchor to.
The customer connection commerce lost on the way to digital
The most quietly damning comparison in the conversation is between two feedback mechanisms. At Victoria’s Secret, when the catalog was most of the business, the team listened in on phone calls — customers volunteered that a style was running big, mentioned they’d been buying for twenty years, told you the whole story. Digital replaced that with a return form and a checkbox.
What’s left is reconstruction: voice-of-the-customer surveys, NPS, returns reports, and above all ratings and reviews, which Falletta calls the biggest piece. This is where AI is genuinely earning its keep for her team — vendors whose models surface commonalities and sentiment across review volume no one could read manually. The interesting part is what it’s being used for. Not generating anything. Rebuilding the signal that the phone call used to deliver for free, and routing it back to design and merchandising partners.
Agentic discovery is SEO without the rulebook
On agentic commerce, Falletta is neither dismissive nor breathless: actively chasing it, moving quick but not so quick they make too many mistakes. The frustration is that the rules aren’t knowable yet. SEO was hard but legible — copy on listing pages, the right keywords, URL parameters that make sense, and you knew roughly what Google would reward.
That reshuffles who owns discovery. If Reddit threads and earned articles are among the top sources models pull from, visibility becomes partly a PR job. It also breaks single-target optimization: you can look strong on Claude and rank low on Gemini in the same week, and — unlike paid search — Falletta isn’t aware of a first position you can simply buy, though she expects that to come. Cole Haan’s advantage here is one you can’t shortcut — decades of real content, real stores, real customers, in a system that is genuinely hard to fake.
Then there’s the catalog feed. Where models once scraped your site and drew their own conclusions, Google, OpenAI, and payment partners now invite you to upload your catalog — which turns discovery back into a merchandising decision, closer to a shopping channel than to search. Falletta’s framing is the same one she applies to personalization: core products, the fashion product you want seen, and enough category breadth to represent the brand — oxfords, loafers, sneakers, dress shoes — without dumping thousands of SKUs into the feed.
A hundred years of equity, and where AI is allowed to touch it
Asked how she coaches her team on AI, Falletta names two places and rules out a third. Reporting is the clear yes: collapsing the hours spent pulling and dissecting reports into insight fast enough to optimize in season. Operational work on the site is the second. Copy and images are the no.
Cole Haan spent nearly a century accumulating the equity that makes a customer say “I remember buying my first pair.” Generated copy and imagery can spend that down considerably faster than it was built. Falletta ends on the discipline that holds all of it together, and she knows how it sounds.
Sound Bites
- “Average UPT on most sites is like 1.4. We want that customer to buy more. What products are we putting together that make sense together? Because sometimes the machines don’t know that — that these items were actually bought to be together.”
- “These are the products we need to stand for as a brand, and making sure they’re visible to the customer. The machine’s not going to know that, unless it’s getting engagement.”
- “But on site, if we continue to personalize and personalize and personalize, that story is going to start to get diluted. And then what’s going to happen is it’s going to be like, these are the products you need to buy. And that’s it.”
- “I know that customers don’t read the copy. The average customer spends about thirty seconds on your product detail page, so they’re not reading all of the copy.”
- “The amount of different resources that these AI agents are using to pull information is very different than SEO. Reddit is a big one.”
- “I wouldn’t chase that as much personally, because I think you lose the authenticity of the brand and the lifestyle of the brand. You still want it to feel like a real person who’s experiencing the brand and wearing the brand in different moments.”
- “You need to know the customer like it’s your best friend. If you start to disconnect yourself because we’re going so quick and utilizing all these new AI programs, you’ll slowly start to see that you’re not connected with the customer — and then the customer will see that, and feel it.”
The Chord take
The critique of personalization here isn’t nostalgia — it’s a systems argument. A personalization engine optimizes against what customers have already bought, which means it is structurally biased toward the products that already sell. Run that loop hard enough and it eats the fashion product, the higher price point, the pattern — the parts of the assortment that exist to say something about the brand rather than to convert this session. The engine isn’t malfunctioning. It was never given the intent that design and merchandising encoded in the season’s story, so it can’t weigh it. That gap is a context problem, and it shows up twice in this conversation in nearly identical form. Choosing what to personalize is a merchandising decision the algorithm can’t make alone; choosing what to put in an agent feed is the same decision, one layer further from your site. Falletta’s answer in both cases is a human deciding what the brand stands for, and a machine handling the volume beneath it. Which is also why her AI line is drawn where it is. Reporting, review mining, sentiment across returns — that work reconstructs the customer signal digital commerce lost when the phone call became a checkbox, and it makes a merchant faster without replacing their judgment. Generated copy and imagery do the opposite: they spend brand equity to save time. One scales the listening. The other scales the output and quietly erodes the asset.
Put it to work
- 1Draw the machine/merchant line explicitly. Let search own the full product listing page; own curated shops, new arrivals, and campaign product by hand — and write down which is which so it doesn’t drift.
- 2Audit what your personalization engine suppresses. Pull the products that rarely surface and check how many are the higher-price, brighter-color, patterned items your season’s story depends on.
- 3Treat UPT as a merchandising target, not just a recommendation-engine metric. Curate the trays and complete-the-look slots where affinity data is thin, since co-purchase history won’t tell you what belongs together.
- 4Move fit guidance out of the copy block. If customers give a PDP thirty seconds, carry sizing and fit in imagery — and check actual usage before investing further in a fit tool.
- 5Make your agent feed a merchandising decision: core products, the fashion product you want seen, and category breadth — not the entire catalog. Then measure visibility per engine, because one model’s ranking says nothing about another’s.
- 6Point AI at reporting and review mining before brand assets. Compress the report-pulling cycle so the team can react in season, and keep generated copy and imagery away from the brand’s voice and lifestyle.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce behind some of what I call iconic — or next-to-be-iconic — brands. Today I'm joined by Laurie Falletta, VP of Ecommerce at Cole Haan, who I would put in the category of absolutely iconic brand, certainly a brand that I've known for a really long time. So Laurie, thanks for being here.
Laurie Falletta
Thank you for having me. I had to be here.
Bryan Mahoney
I'm very excited that we're here in person. I do an awful lot of these where I'm on the other end of a Zoom screen with someone, but my favorite thing to do is to be able to sit down in person. So I appreciate you making time late on a Thursday night in kind of rainy New York City.
Laurie Falletta
Excited to be here.
Bryan Mahoney
Normally my first warm-up question is, where am I finding you today? But I know exactly where I'm finding you today — in New York City, in the East Village. And we both just came from the Lead conference, sort of the culmination of what used to be known as the conference where a lot of DTC brands would be. I think increasingly it's become this really healthy mix of DTC and traditional retail, as every brand in the world is sort of a DTC brand. And as I think about Cole Haan — maybe take a minute or two and tell us the story, because obviously DTC is a big part of it, but the brand is so old that DTC wasn't a thing when it originated.
Laurie Falletta
Cole Haan has been around for — it's actually going to be almost a hundred years. In 2028, that's what year we're almost in. So 1928. It started off as really a men's footwear brand and sort of evolved over the years into a multi-gender brand that everyone knows for not only just shoes, but now accessories and handbags. It's definitely evolved over time, and I think we'll continue to evolve. But Cole Haan is really known for its legendary comfortable footwear that you can wear from work to a night out. It has multi-purpose. So our key initiative is really meeting you at every moment — you can wear these shoes from nine to nine. That's sort of what we say.
Bryan Mahoney
One of the first movers, as I think about it, in real innovation in footwear. I remember buying my first pair because I was like, this looks like it's going to be super comfortable. If I'm running from gate A14 to terminal B36 and I need to sprint to catch my plane, and I need to show up at a meeting and look good — these are the shoes I probably want to have on my foot.
Laurie Falletta
And you still look exactly that. It's really about looking stylish but still having the comfort. So it's not like you need to take two pairs of shoes — let me take my sneakers to be able to travel in and then take my dress shoes to change into. Those stiff, what I'll call clunky dress shoes, even for women — it's just not really what people are wearing. Especially post-Covid, where people were just dressed more casually. Yes, there is a spot in your closet for the types of shoes you would wear to, say, a wedding. But even that — if you go to a wedding these days, people are wearing comfortable Cole Haan shoes that again are very versatile.
Bryan Mahoney
I remember at first the Nike partnership, or the Nike investment, a million years ago — it feels like now. That sort of was maybe the genesis for the thing being super comfortable. That's definitely what got me intrigued by the brand and why I bought my first pair.
Laurie Falletta
Cole Haan was one of the first companies that had that hybrid shoe. So I think that's what is really interesting about the brand, and a lot of other brands out there sort of copied that over the years, which is the ultimate form of flattery. But I do think there's just something about how we can continue to evolve our product, but still always be that — if you just ask customers, oh, it's comfortable, that's why I want it. And it's funny, you had said, oh, I remember buying my first pair. Like anyone I talk to, I remember buying my first pair. They have that connection to the brand, or they've had a family member introduce them to the brand — oh, I was with my dad buying my first pair of dress shoes and they were at Cole Haan.
Bryan Mahoney
So we've said a couple of things here, like product and innovation and brand. And then you talked already about category expansion. So people who know the brand have given you permission to sell them other things that are not comfortable shoes. But let's put a pin in that for a sec, because you have not been at the company since its inception in 1928.
Laurie Falletta
I have not.
Bryan Mahoney
But you've had a really interesting career, from looking into it as I got ready to sit down with you today. So maybe take a couple of minutes and tell everyone where you came from and what you did leading up to the role that you now occupy at Cole Haan.
Laurie Falletta
I've been in ecommerce over eighteen-plus years. I basically was out of college, knew I wanted to be in some sort of merchandising fashion business role. At the time, ecommerce was such a small part of the business in retail, and so I started off at Victoria's Secret on their ecommerce team, which again was only about five percent of their business. They had a Victoria's Secret catalog, and that was ninety-five percent of our business. Crazy to say that — people calling in and ordering product. Which is just so interesting, because I think there's a lot there that we sort of lost over the years as you start to see more customers transitioning to online, where you have that disconnect with the customer. So we could probably get into that. But anyway, I spent almost ten years at Victoria's Secret across a number of different categories, leading digital and then also doing merchandising. At the time, because the website and the catalog were a smaller portion of the entire business, I was actually a merchant, working back with the design team and creating an assortment.
Laurie Falletta
Then I decided that I really wanted to hone in on digital and kind of disconnect myself for a bit from the product and really learn more. So I moved on to Bed Bath & Beyond to learn more about digital, and that's really where I was able to partner with a lot of technology partners, understand different tech stacks and how do we build a website — the nuts and bolts. I spent about five years there, then decided I missed product and I was like, I need to go back and do some merchandising. So I went to The Children's Place, wanted to get back into more of an apparel, and spent almost three years there again leading all of their brand websites as well as doing merchandising. And then I spent about two years at Foot Locker. Really loved Foot Locker as a brand and really their leadership there. I also wanted to get some experience around a multi-brand, which is very different than a mono-brand, so I led footlocker.com there for North America. And then I decided to shift to Cole Haan to go and lead their brand.
Bryan Mahoney
What a trajectory. And I think maybe the through line there is there's always been a large product assortment — culminating, I guess, in Foot Locker, where it's not just a large product assortment but that multi-brand assortment. I get to sit down with an awful lot of folks who are marketers and have maybe started from the position of acquisition or retention-based marketing. What's really fascinating about your career is there's merchandising, which seems to be the through line for it. So as you think about the job you need to do today, or you think about a young marketer getting started in their career, what advice would you have for them? What have you learned by being hands-on with merchandising and a large product catalog that you wouldn't be as effective in your job without?
Laurie Falletta
I think the biggest thing is really understanding the product life cycle. Someone that doesn't really have that background of merchandising may not understand, how does the product come to life? How do we produce it? What is the costing aspect of it? What is the minimum aspect of it? How do we plan how much inventory we actually need, and what's the life cycle — when do we mark it down, when do we keep it at full price? So I think that's really what helps me when I'm thinking about the overarching web experience in any brand: what are the products that we're leading with, and how are we telling the story? And then also understanding, are we selling it at the right margin?
Laurie Falletta
Someone that doesn't tend to have that product experience may know what a margin is and a gross margin, but at the end of the day, I know when I'm trying to run my business that I'm always trying to make sure that we're making profit. And you think about how the industry has really changed with all the promotional activity. I mean, Black Friday is like two months now, right, when you think about it. So really just having that mindset of, hey, I can't sell something at a negative margin, or I can't sell something below a fifty margin, depending on what business you're in — obviously that varies. And then also being able to really understand the product and how you're going to have that come to life on site. Not having actual tangible product in your hand, like when you're in a store, when you're trying to purchase online — you need to know how to build that online. And that's super important. So once you understand the product as a merchant and how it all comes together, you can help build that and say, okay, I think I need a complete-the-look on our product detail pages, or I think I need enriched content so that I can show them the technology or innovation of that product that they may not see because it's not in person.
Bryan Mahoney
It's so fascinating to hear you describe merchandising, because I think oftentimes we think about merchandising as, what does the product assortment look like? How do I have a grid that is going to encourage people to add maybe multiple things to their cart? How do I help a customer with discovery? But if I really pull apart your answer, you're describing someone who is more the general manager of the operation. How am I thinking about planning, and the product I have in the warehouse, and margin? And I do think that our industry, retail or DTC, for a period — maybe a prolonged period — forgot the fundamentals of a profitable business. We sort of convinced ourselves that if we get this customer in the door, eventually their LTV is going to be some astronomical number, so we can afford to just throw whatever number out there to acquire them the first time. And I like that disciplined approach to planning and merchandising. There's an art and a science there too. The science is, I need to sell a certain amount of product to make a certain amount of margin. And the art, it would seem to me, is what do I think a customer is going to respond really well to? So they're finding what they want, they're buying what they need, and maybe they're also leaving with something they didn't think they wanted, but that benefits their holistic experience of the brand and improves your bottom line.
Laurie Falletta
And also, I think there is an aspect of it that if you have that merchandising eye, you know what goes together. A lot of ecommerce leaders talk about UPT and really building that cart. So how do we talk about product recommendation trays? You really need that eye to know what will work in that spot within your PDP or on your home page. Because I know a lot of it is algorithm now, but in some cases some of it needs to be curated as well. And you don't always want to just drive your customer to a page that has thousands of items when you're trying to tell a story. So I think you need to have that eye to be able to say what goes together, so that I can drive that customer to buy more than just one item. Because average UPT on most sites is like 1.4. We want that customer to buy more. Not even probably — what products are we putting together that make sense together? Because sometimes the machines don't know that. That it was actually bought to be together, those items.
Bryan Mahoney
So I think I need an acronym dictionary on this podcast page. UPT — units per transaction.
Laurie Falletta
Yes.
Bryan Mahoney
I didn't intend to go to the machines just yet, but I realized that I'm sitting across from someone who is probably one of the foremost experts in our industry. And I'm imagining you're playing around with tools that will allow for more of an algorithmic merchandising experience. What's your reaction been like so far? Are there some that are getting it right, or are they losing that magic? Where do you net out on this sort of being data-informed and trusting your gut, versus being completely hands-off and data-driven?
Laurie Falletta
I think there has to be a balance, to be honest. The machines, they're machines, they do a great job, they do what we need them to do. I don't think that there is an aspect — this is my opinion — that we need to manually merchandise an entire product listing page. Because that's the reason we have search and search tools, and that's their job. But I do think that there is an aspect, especially if you have a curated shop that you're driving your customer to, you need to merchandise that. So I think there is a balance between you have to look at the data and say, okay, that's what I know is working, and the machine is taking that data and actually updating minute by minute what is shown to the customer. But then I think there's also a piece where we have to, as merchandisers, as ecommerce owners, say, this is what we want to get in front of the customer, because it's a new product, or we think it's a trending color or a trending fabric, and they're not going to be able to find it because it may not be my best-selling product just yet, but I want to get that in front of them. Or, hey, this is what I'm featuring on my home page or in my emails or in social, and I want to make sure that product is findable and it's at the top of the page. And so the machine's not going to know that, unless it's getting engagement. So I think it's just a balance between how do we make sure we're taking the learnings and making sure that the machine is doing what it needs to do, but then also taking our own gut and saying, hey, these are the products we need to stand for as a brand, and making sure that they're visible to the customer.
Bryan Mahoney
And I think that's got to be where the difference between brand and marketplace sort of shows up. I think a marketplace's responsibility is largely to show you the product that you came there for. But when you're a brand, I think about the experience of walking into an owned and operated store — imagine that store changed and morphed for every single person that walked through that door. I have a relationship with certain brands because I feel like they know me, but I also really appreciate the experience of shopping with them. And as a customer, I still want to be led. I still want to feel like they have a point of view on the style or the category generally, and I kind of want to experience that. And I guess my fear is that just because we can do something, does it mean that we should? We are definitely living in an era that if we wanted to personalize every single experience for every single shopper on our site, we probably can now. But does that move us — going back to something you said at the beginning — even further away from our customer? Are we missing the point? So is this infatuation with micro-personalization, is there a risk of going too far, in your opinion?
Laurie Falletta
I think so. I think that what will happen is that it's going to start to dilute the overall story. So when you think about the product life cycle — and it sort of goes back to the merchandising part of my brain — you work with design, they're kind of telling you what the story of the season is, and then you want to try to bring it to life in your store and on your website. Like you said, the store is not going to change every minute. They're going to have those stories curated on certain tables or in certain walls, and it's going to stay there for as long as the campaign is running. But on site, if we continue to personalize and personalize and personalize, that story is going to start to get diluted. And then what's going to happen is it's going to be like, these are the products you need to buy. And that's it. And there's not going to be anything else that's more of the tertiary that you want. And sometimes that's the good stuff, right? That kind of gets pushed out. That's not always the best sellers, because maybe they're a little bit of a higher price point, or maybe they're more of a brighter color. And you'll start to just have the basic black, white, neutrals, if I'm thinking about shoes or apparel, versus maybe more of the patterns — because it's really focusing in on what the customer is buying or what they're looking for.
Bryan Mahoney
It feels like one gigantic experiment right now. And maybe I'm a helpless consumer romantic, but I worry that if we over-optimize for the conversion at hand, sometimes we lose sight of these brand-building moments. Was my UPT on that one transaction as high as it could have been? No. But was my experience with the brand a ten out of ten? Am I going to come back quickly the next time I need something? Am I going to go back to Cole Haan, because that was an amazing experience and I got this really thoughtful email? Also maybe yes. And I know that's such a difficult thing to measure. We are also coming out of this era where we needed to measure absolutely everything, and that's getting harder and harder and harder. But yeah, I don't have a perfect answer for this.
Laurie Falletta
I don't. And then I think there are brands that need to personalize because they have millions of products on site. So I think that it really varies. But when I think about a mono-brand like a Cole Haan, I do think that there has to be that balance between being true to the brand and then also being able to show the customer what they want. So I think a lot of that's through not even just personalization, but through that curation that I'm talking about. Again, there may be brands where there's just thousands of products on the website and you need to be able to personalize it, because the customer will never find what they need — to help them filter it down to a place where they can get in and out.
Bryan Mahoney
And we still are delivering a great service to them, because we've used technology to help you find the thing that we can intuit that you're ultimately looking for. Well, technology is not all bad, and I do live in it an awful lot. Maybe let's talk about some ways that perhaps you're using technology to solve some hard problems. It's very difficult to try on a Cole Haan shoe online. I don't think you've cracked the code on that, but is there anything that you're doing with technology to help me find my fit better? Maybe not even at Cole Haan, but some of the experience you had at Victoria's Secret, because it's a similar problem. And I think definitely one of the things that is difficult in this industry is that returns are really high. So when you think about merchandising, is it fair to say that that's under the umbrella of things that you need to worry about?
Laurie Falletta
It definitely is. I think the biggest thing is that I know that customers don't read the copy. Most the average customer, they don't. I know, it's crazy — all my copy partner friends are going to come after me — but they spend about thirty seconds on your product detail page. And so they're not reading all of the copy within that thirty seconds. In that copy, we want to put that size up, or, doesn't fit for a wider foot, or, is an oversized t-shirt, and they're not reading that all the time. Some customers are. But I do think there are tools out there. I don't know of any brand yet that I've seen that has cracked the code on it. I know there are different fit tools that different footwear brands use. Some, I would say, feel like it's a benefit, some feel like it hasn't. In my past it hasn't really worked. I do think that there were other tools, like for example at Victoria's Secret, that we built. When you go into a store, they're fitting you for a bra, and you can't do that unless you're doing it yourself. So we had to build tools to be able to tell a customer, hey, how do you do this at home? So I think that there are tools that can help, but like I said, I don't think that there is anyone that has really done it right. So I think a lot of that is kind of thinking about how do we build out that experience on our product detail pages, either through alt images to kind of tell the customer what they need, versus in a copy block, versus an actual tool. Because a lot of those tools, the usage is just really low.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it's easier to just order two.
Laurie Falletta
Unfortunately, that's what a lot of people do. And then return. But then again, if you think about it, everyone's foot is different, everyone's body size is different. No matter what type of copy you put, or tool — if you just don't like it, they're going to return it for sure. So I don't think there is anything that's perfect out there that's going to say, okay, this is going to tell you exactly your size and you need to purchase that. I think though, somewhat like Foot Locker for example, everyone knew what size they were in the brand that they loved, and Nike. So they knew already. They didn't need that tool. But in a brand like a Cole Haan, if you're a new customer, you may need something like that. So we're looking to see what could help us. But again, I don't think that there's personally anything that has kind of cracked the code in terms of that will help the customer one hundred percent.
Bryan Mahoney
And then maybe what about the CX team? Is there anything that you've learned in the era that we've lived in with AI, in things like review information or return information, that gives you any insight that you might be able to deploy in the future? I'm just curious, like some of these things that we think about on the storefront and we're going to do all these things, but I'm more interested in how we can leverage these tools behind the scenes to actually move us closer to the customer, or find those little efficiencies. So just curious if the team's done anything so far.
Laurie Falletta
We definitely dig a lot into the reviews, and then even just into the returns. This sort of goes back to my comment earlier around where we've kind of lost that connection with the customer as they turned more digital. When I worked at Victoria's Secret, you talked to the customer on the phone. We would listen in onto the phone calls, and the customer would talk and say, this style is running so big, you guys need to look at the fit. And, I've been a customer for twenty years — they would give us their whole story and we would take that feedback. Here, it's like you're doing a return, you're checking the top box. So we're not getting a ton of information from the customer. So we do try to get as much information through our voice-of-the-customer surveys that we have on site, and looking at our NPS score, and really digging into ratings and reviews and our returns reports, and really just trying to get as much information and seeing, where are the commonalities? And then going back and working with our design partners, our merchandising partners, to get that information. But a lot of it is really through — I would say the ratings and reviews is really the biggest piece. So we've been using those vendors, there's a lot of them out there now, that kind of help us curate through their own AI of, what are the commonalities that we're seeing and the sentiments that we're seeing.
Bryan Mahoney
So beyond pulling out information there — I have to say it, but there's an awful lot of conversation these days about agentic commerce. Before we know it, agents are going to be doing all of our shopping for us and this isn't going to be a problem. But in order for agents to shop for us, agents have to be able to discover the product. And I'm hearing an awful lot from people about an emphasis on reviews and encouraging people to write those words, so that Cole Haan or any other brand is going to be relevant. Just curious, from a discovery point of view, how important has that been for Cole Haan? Is the team investing anything in visibility across some of these agent engines?
Laurie Falletta
I think everyone is at this point, and really trying to understand that. If you read articles — I just read the article about Google and how they've kind of amplified their search engine and what it is, and turned it truly all into AI, and not what it used to just be, like our generic search box. So yes, the answer is yes. We all are. But I think we're all just still trying to figure out what does that mean, because there's so many different agentic platforms out there and they all tell you something different. And so I don't think that we all know yet what is the right thing that you need to do. Whereas with SEO — okay, we know we need to have SEO copy on our product listing pages, we need to make sure that we're using the right keywords out there, that our URL parameters make sense, so that when Google crawls it's going to bring us to the top. So that was very not easy, but you knew what you needed to do.
Bryan Mahoney
If you remember the early days of that, though, to me this feels like the early days of us building a bunch of shadow pages and backlinks that no one was ever going to see. That never felt good, but we were always trying to stay one step ahead of the algorithm, and then it would change.
Laurie Falletta
It changed. Oh, shoot. Now what do I do? That's exactly how I feel.
Bryan Mahoney
But it did get to a point where we understood, okay, well, these are the rules of the game. Semantically, I should be doing the following things, and then I will at least stand a good chance of showing up. And then, of course, I can pay — and if I pay, then that guarantees that I show up in the first spot. I'm sure we'll get there one day when we'll understand.
Laurie Falletta
But I think that there are so many different tactics that we need to understand. Just kind of meeting with companies that give reporting — the amount of different resources that these AI agents are using to pull information is very different than SEO. Reddit is a big one, and being able to be out there on Reddit. And even just leveraging articles out there, and how important that is now for, say, someone who is in your PR department, to make sure that they're getting out there. Because if you're looking at what these prompts are and how they're being resourced in terms of what's pulling back, Reddit and those articles are some of the top resources there. And so it's difficult right now, because I think that there's just so much that we need to do and get ahead of in order to make sure that we're being a brand that's pulling back in terms of the results.
Bryan Mahoney
I would imagine a brand like yours, given its heritage and the fact that you've been around for that many years and have that many customers — the thing that encourages me somewhat about the way that these agents are working is that it's difficult to fake. They're looking at real content and they're trying to decide authentically what is relevant and ultimately what is important. So having reach, having stores, meeting customers where they are, delivering a good brand experience — there's no shortcuts to that. You've got to keep doing all the right things.
Laurie Falletta
And it's something that anyone in ecommerce is just going to have to continue to stay on top of, because I think it's just going to take a couple of years to learn what are the right strategies. And we're all going to have to just test and learn, because we're all going to be fighting for the same position at the end of the day. Whereas to your point, you were able to pay for the first spot. Maybe eventually we'll get there where we can actually pay for the AI agent to have us as a top brand. I'm not aware of anything right now that you'd be able to do, but I'm sure we're getting there. So it's just really staying on top of it and understanding what are the strategies that we need to go after to be able to protect our brand. And there's going to be a point where I'm sure you're going to have the whole shopping and checkout experience just within these AI platforms, and eventually maybe customers won't even hit your website. Which is just crazy, right?
Bryan Mahoney
So how do you think about merchandising in that world? Because as I think about the tools that are available to us today — early on, the agents, or the frontier models, were doing all the discovery on their own. They would scrape your site and then they would figure it out. But now, if you're Google or if you're OpenAI, or if you're partnering with Stripe, they're asking you to upload your catalog to them. So that gives you an opportunity to merchandise. And so that starts to feel an awful lot like the shopping channels that we grew up with twenty years ago. As a merchandiser, given the opportunity to upload your catalog, are you already starting to think about what products? Do we think about hero products? It can't be everything, right?
Laurie Falletta
I think it goes back to what we were talking about even with the personalization. How are we going to continue to tell the story of the brand and really lead with the product that we feel we want the customer to see, without diluting the entire story? So it's really going to be about how are you making sure your core products are part of it, and you're also having some of more of your fashion products that you want customers to see, and then also making sure that you have a nice breadth of different categories within there. So if you think about in Cole Haan's case, we have oxfords, we have loafers, we have sneakers, we have dress shoes. And so you want to make sure that you're going to cover all of those different categories, but you don't want to put everything really, because at the end of the day you'd have thousands of products.
Bryan Mahoney
You're still putting your best foot forward.
Laurie Falletta
Exactly.
Bryan Mahoney
So fair to say, you're not overreacting to this right now. You're not sprinting, you're being aware of it.
Laurie Falletta
I think we're actively chasing it. It's just trying to really understand what do we need to go after — moving quick, but not quick where we'll make too many mistakes. So I think there's still just a lot to learn, because all of these agentic platforms are just so different. It's like, you can't even just chase one. Because you may say, okay, I got it really good on Claude, but wait — oh, no, now on Gemini we're ranking really low there. So it's not just one focus any longer, like Google. There's just so many different focuses. So it's a challenge.
Bryan Mahoney
And there's a lot more reasoning that's built into each of them. What I have seen is it changes a lot, and much more so than I remember those seminal changes to the search algorithm that made us all scramble to rethink what we were doing before. Now it feels like it's a much slower evolution. Speaking of slow, maybe I'll wind us up sort of talking about AI. Are you taking a similar slow-and-steady approach across your team? How are you coaching your team to use tools to get them not further away from the customer, but closer to the customer? I'd really love to hear what's working for you or what's not working.
Laurie Falletta
So I would say in terms of tools, it's really around reporting for me that I think is really important. To be able to say, instead of those long hours of pulling reports and dissecting them and being able to understand, okay, what's actually happening in the business — how do we make sure that we are leveraging AI to be able to help pull all that information together, to help us build or come to a conclusion, insights, to be able to make changes and optimize in real time? So I think that's a big one for us, because it's really being able to react quicker. There's also the whole aspect of operational excellence in terms of how do we utilize AI with websites. You can do copy in AI now, you can do images in AI, and it's much quicker. But again, we're not chasing that. I wouldn't chase that as much personally, because I think you again lose the authenticity of the brand and the lifestyle of the brand. So I'd say there's places that you can do that, but then there's other places that you probably don't want to do that, because you still want it to feel like a real person that's experiencing the brand and wearing the brand in different moments. So those would be, I would say, the two focuses I'm kind of telling the team. If we're going to try to go after it anywhere internally, those are the two places we need to focus on.
Bryan Mahoney
I think those are exceptionally wise words. It took nearly a hundred years for Cole Haan to get to where it is today. That's an awful lot of brand equity built up over time. You're sitting on a ton of data, and being able to leverage AI to get you faster insights, to be able to do things for the customer, seems like a logical place to invest. But then also cautioning the team to not move so fast with copy and images that can very quickly, much faster than one hundred years, erode that brand equity. And I think that's maybe a good place to end today's conversation. Great advice for people who are feeling like everything is happening so fast, and a good reminder that iconic brands are built over time, are built with careful connection with their customers. And we need to use that connection and that responsibility — we need to treat that very preciously.
Laurie Falletta
I'd say it's probably the most important thing for anyone that is within retail or ecommerce: you have to have that connection to that customer, no matter where we go with AI or in any aspect of ecommerce. Because I think that if you lose your focus on the customer, it's just never going to work. I know it's cliché, but you need to know the customer like it's your best friend. And if you start to really disconnect yourself, because we're going so quick and utilizing all these new AI programs, you'll slowly start to see that you're not connected with the customer. And then the customer will see that, and feel it. Which is why a lot of customers are starting to go back into stores, because they want that person-to-person, human connection that they were not getting on digital. So I think it's just staying close to your customer, knowing what they want, learning from them, and then taking those learnings and doing what you need to build the experience.
Bryan Mahoney
I don't think it's cliché at all. I think it's exceptionally wise words. So thank you very much, and thanks for being here tonight with me.
Laurie Falletta
Thank you for having me.