January Digital, the agency and consultancy behind Kendra
Scott’s and Carhartt’s recent ecommerce growth, uses about 50 data sources -- everything from polling to economic to weather.
“I’m positive there’s more data out
there we could be using,” said Vic Drabicky, founder and CEO of January Digital, when asked about what type of data the company would use if they could. “I wouldn’t say there’s
an obvious source of data out there that we need to use. I wouldn’t say if we only had this one type of data the whole world would be better."
As we spoke on Zoom, I noticed the Pearl
Jam picture and VIP music badges behind his desk and asked him how many he has.
I have about a dozen VIP badges from music artists such as the Rolling Stones and Santana. He did not give me a
number, but mentioned that “he’s a “big-time music junkie,” and that a friend of his played drums with Ben Harper, an American singer-songwriter, who opened for the band Pearl
Jam for about five years.
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“I rode his coattails for years,” he said. “He played on the last Ringo Starr album.”
Drabicky ended up in advertising and data
because of his love of numbers. “We get pretty deep into segmentation data and analysis, which allows us to better understand customers being acquired and lost by a company,” he said.
He wrote music reviews for years, until a musician friend’s wife said, “hey, there’s this thing called Google, and I think it’s going to become something.” At the time
you would write anything you wanted, email it to them, and they would post it,” he said. She ended up offering Drabicky a job in digital marketing. They built up the company and sold it to
iProspect in the U.S.
Drabicky worked inside J. Crew and Tory Burch for a while to figure out the rest of his life.
January Digital relies heavily on artificial intelligence (AI).
“We don’t have the deepest pockets, like some other companies that take on private equity,” he said. “Between 50% and 75% of our analytics goes through AI, but ultimately
humans review it.”
For Kendra Scott, Drabicky spearheaded a full-funnel digital media campaign that has increased ecommerce revenue by 18%, and grew Google searches by 51% YoY for
the company.
His team’s approach included expanding Kendra Scott’s presence across YouTube, TikTok and Meta, leveraging new audience-targeting strategies to tap into Gen
Z and Millennial shoppers.
Carhartt tapped into Gen Z and social commerce. The brand’s heritage in premium workwear resonates strongly with Gen Z, which I found surprising but
true unless you live in a rural area.
January Digital capitalized on this by creating the brand’s first influencer campaign and activating across key platforms such as Snapchat and
TikTok with strategies that led to record-breaking holiday-season results, with Carhartt surpassing its ecommerce revenue goal by 10%.
The key seemed to be capitalizing on cultural
moments. January Digital successfully activated campaigns around cultural moments such as the Barbie movie for Kendra Scott and college football sponsorships for Carhartt.
These
moments, coupled with personalized targeting and cross-platform support, helped both brands significantly increased awareness and engagement.
In September, the company
hired Rebecca Visconti as vice president of analytics, the latest in a series of strategic hires. Visconti leads the analytics team and the
company's continued expansion of advanced analytics modeling and AI-powered analytics system.