Hatch, an innovation group backed by Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp., and Joor, a digital wholesale platform for fashion, beauty and home, have signed a commercial partnership in which the Hatch Digital In-Showroom software will be included in Joor’s service offering to its customers.
Hatch said the partnership marks a key step in its vision to digitize wholesale selling and also supports Joor’s mission to create an innovative digital ecosystem where all brands and retailers can meet to efficiently and profitably grow their wholesale business.
“We look up to Joor for their position as an industry-leading platform that is transforming the wholesale industry and are excited that the Hatch Digital In-Showroom technology can play a part in elevating their offering to customers,” said Anne-Christine Polet, senior vice president of digital ventures at Hatch, PVH Europe. “It further demonstrates the value that the Hatch software can bring to the fashion industry.”
The Hatch Digital In-Showroom technology focuses on the traditional in-showroom experience, offering brands an intuitive way to digitize their physical wholesale appointments. First developed in 2014 by PVH, the Digital In-Showroom technology has since helped change the wholesale selling process for Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.
Hatch, leveraging its five years of fashion-tech expertise and real-world learnings, has since January been bringing the Digital In-Showroom technology to the wider fashion industry through a SaaS model, in which access to the cloud-hosted technology is provided on a subscription basis. Based on this expertise, Hatch also offers digital transformation consultancy services to ease a brand’s transition into the future of wholesale selling.
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“Hatch is at the forefront of modernizing digital in-showroom commerce,” Joor CEO Kristin Savilia told Sourcing Journal. “Joor brands and retailers have come to expect the latest innovations from our company. Integrating Hatch into our service offering will make the overall buying experience for our customers richer, and we are pleased to partner with Hatch to deliver it.”
Under the new partnership, Joor will offer select brands exclusive and seamless access to Hatch’s Digital in-Showroom software. Founded in 2010, Joor has put the entire buying process online to make wholesale smoother and smarter for brands and retailers.
“The partnership with Hatch allows us to have a really razzle-dazzle front end in the in-showroom experience,” Savilia said. “My belief has always been…you build a core product and build a core relationship. But it’s really great if you can find best-in-class solutions that do other things really well, that you can plug into your platform and allows for that seamless experience rather than trying to tackle and build everything by yourself.”
She said Joor’s wholesale management platform connecting more than 8,600 brands with 200,000 retailers across 144 countries every day, with 75 percent of the world’s luxury brands using it to conduct their wholesale business, is “where we win every time.” Joor enables the buying process and extends through the entire purchase and delivery cycle, complete with reporting that offers rich post-season insights.
Joor handles over $1.5 billion transactions every month. It provides an ecosystem that combines dynamic virtual showrooms with collaborative tools including Joor Passport, which centralizes the trade show experience across multiple fashion events.
Joor provides virtual showrooms that run independent of the buying calendar and facilitate 24/7 wholesale shopping from anywhere in the world. Beyond the virtual showroom, Joor enables brands and retailers to manage every piece of wholesale online so they can view line sheets, place and manage orders, schedule virtual appointments and optimize performance and growth through data insights.
These capabilities have never been more important than during the pandemic, Savilia noted, with people not being able to travel and conduct business as usual. Joor has been around for 10 years and has utilized technology such as iPads and virtual showrooms, she said.
“When the pandemic hit in February, our business shifted overnight to our virtual showroom product and we focused our attention to that product, as well, so that we could get ahead of this curve and provide more features,” Savilia said. “In that very short period of time, we added 360-degree imaging to our virtual showroom, we added video by style, we added a new feature called the Edit, which is an interactive narrowing down of the assortment, and that all came because of the pandemic.”
Joor is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Paris, London, Milan, Madrid, Melbourne and Tokyo. More than 30 major retailers exclusively use Joor to manage their wholesale business, including Neiman Marcus, Shopbop and Harrods.
Joor Passport is intended for the current market conditions of restricted travel as well as the post-pandemic era when physical events resume. It centralizes the trade show and fashion week experience by creating a one-stop-shop for users: one place to upload data, one website to visit, one app to download, and one comprehensive experience. Joor will host 16 fashion events this season via Passport.
Savilia added that once the pandemic is over, companies are more likely to take an omnichannel approach to their wholesale buying, making Joor and Hatch’s combined strengths even more appealing.