In this series, PAN Communications invites you to get to know the 2018 Cohort of the New York Fashion Tech Lab (NYFT Lab). Helmed out of the global fashion capital – New York City – for the last five years, the NYFT Lab has been at the forefront of retail and fashion technology innovation and integration. As part of PAN New York’s engagement with NYFT Lab, we’re bringing you a sneak peek at the amazing women and their killer tech that’s being tested among some of the world’s leading brands and retail companies. Caroline Klatt is nothing short of the term impressive. A 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 winner for her retail and ecommerce prowess, Caroline – cofounder and CEO of Headliner Labs – is changing the way retailers better connect with their customers by powering chat-based marketing and customer experiences through highly-trafficked chat channels like Facebook Messenger.

Did I lose you in translation?

Headliner Labs is proving that chat apps represent the future of brand communications with customers and will overtake email as the primary channel through which they can interact with, market to, assist, and deepen relationships with their prospects and customers.

That’s where Headliner Labs is ahead of the curve. Through a proprietary platform, Caroline and her team have supercharged “chatbot marketing” by enabling retailers to proactively reach out to web visitors with direct messages triggered by on-site behavior and delivered in chat apps like Facebook Messenger. These messages, which reach about 70 percent of web visitors, take the form of automated campaigns for everything from abandoned cart or browser reminders, refill notifications, alerts for price drops or restocks, and post-checkout incentives for reordering, to sharing and loyalty rewards prompts, soliciting post-purchase reviews or customer feedback, and anything else a brand might want to automate and deliver through chat.

Fixing an industry problem

Headliner Lab’s chat marketing platform is designed specifically for retail companies looking to reach and retarget more of their lost web visitors, drive engagement and convert more digital sales. With Headliner Labs, brands can identify and intelligently communicate with customers at all points in the engagement and sales funnels as well as the highest-value potential customers, all inside the platform where users spend the most time on their phones: messaging apps.

Specifically, Headliner Labs is answering the conundrum of personalization and scale, helping retailers hit nearly every inbound customer and prospect, meeting them where they are (in chat apps) and when they’re there, without sacrificing quality or a personalized touch. The Headliner Labs platform is enabling companies like Cole Haan, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sally Beauty and Ouai Haircare to launch chatbots and chat marketing instantly. These companies can now send personalized direct messages to more than 75 percent of web traffic, thereby turning churn into customers.

“If brands aren’t doing this and developing strategies for chat marketing, they are just behind,” Caroline noted. “If you’re not investing in chat you shouldn’t plan to be here long term.”

And she’s right. In 2016, Deloitte’s David Schatsky and Peter Gratzke eloquently summarized the coming “conversational enterprise”: From punch cards to arcane keystrokes to graphical user interfaces, the evolution of computing is partly a story of an evolution in how we interact with them. Today, a new computer interaction paradigm is rapidly gaining ground: chatting in natural language. Headliner Labs understands this and by doing so, is bringing the understanding of the consumer – and a desire to unify their experience – closer to brands than ever before.

The New York Fashion Tech Lab 2018 Demo Day is next Thursday, June 7, 2018, at Meredith Corporation in New York City where Caroline and the Cohort will share more information about the value their companies provide to the industry. We can’t wait to share more about the key impacts of the conversational enterprise in the retail and ecommerce industries.