After building one of the largest retail gift card marketing companies in North America and driving hundreds of millions of dollars in sales to retailers, I joined Stitch It Clothing Alterations which has 85 shopping center-based locations across North America.

As the Sales & Marketing Director at Stitch It, I experienced the challenge of distributing our marketing and recruitment campaigns to our 85 shopping centers…it was a NIGHTMARE!

Here's why...

Stitch It, like all tenants, pays significantly each day for numerous opportunities to drive more traffic & sales, in-store and online, through their shopping centers’ digital + physical retail media networks already-paid-for by the “hidden” marketing dollars within their leases; via gross rent, variable rent, CAM fees, marketing/ promo/ad funds, merchant association fees and/or percentage rent.

However, Stitch It was missing out on these numerous traffic & sales driving opportunities!  At the same time, we could see competitors’ campaigns promoted through our shopping centers’ digital + physical retail media networks, while Stitch It campaigns were not; meaning we were paying our shopping centers to promote our competitors and drive traffic & sales away from us!

Every time Stitch It had a campaign to promote, I was spending significant amounts of time, effort and resources to 85 conversations with 85 shopping centers given each shopping center has their own way of managing their retailers’ campaigns; varying image sizes & formats, different contacts for different content along with handling contact updates, unique requirements to each property, varying ways of accepting the content, specific rules/policies and more.   

Plus, there was no way to keep track of which shopping centers were promoting our campaigns VS which ones were not; resulting in lost traffic & sales!

Lastly, it would be costly, time-consuming and inefficient for 85 store managers to have the same conversation with 85 shopping center marketing managers about each marketing campaign.  We wanted each of our 85 store managers spending that hour every week (which collectively equaled 4,420 hours/year based on 85 hours week X 52 weeks/year) servicing more customers and selling more on the store floor VS spending that time trying to engage with our shopping centers’ digital + physical retail media networks.  

After consulting with retailers and shopping centers about these significant challenges & opportunities, and leveraging our teams’ collective 75+ years of retail, real estate, ecommerce and technology experience, Engagement Agents was launched in 2016 and Stitch It became our first customer!

Now, a number of the world’s most recognizable retailers rely on Engagement Agents to reclaim significant amounts of lost traffic & sales by engaging their numerous already-paid-for shopping centers’ digital + physical retail media networks, paid for daily via the “hidden” marketing dollars in their leases!

Connect with me via LinkedIn or feel free to reach out to me via my contact info below. I look forward to hearing from you!