• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 21, 2025

Dr. Martens, an iconic British retail brand, found a way into an AI-powered customer data cloud by way of Amperity, which supports customer experiences through AI.

This has been a way for the brand to recognize and engage with customers across all channels, improving marketing performance while staying ahead of shifting privacy regulations.

This partnership comes at a critical time, as retailers face the challenge of delivering hyper-personalized experiences while adapting to the end of third-party cookies. Brands are becoming more dependent on AI-driven identity resolution and first-party data strategies. The key is building deeper customer relationships to drive sustainable growth.

Retail data strategies required Amperity to build its own version of ChatGPT that allows Dr. Martens to ask natural-language questions of the data.

“You can sit in a room and ask questions of the data like ‘where are all my best customers' stores in these ten cities where I know I closed one who have stopped shopping with my company,” said Matthew Biboud-Lubeck, general manager of Amperity’s EMEA business. “It can find and graph all of them.”

Historically, marketers would need to ask their analytics team to provide the data, which might take a week or more.

Dr. Martens, which has been working to combine all the data it holds, has hundreds of stores and digital properties.

Amperity is working to pull together that data to personalize experiences in its stores and online. They also use that data to develop new products — all stored in the cloud supported by AI.

Amperity, the data layer, helps Dr. Martens identify the type of shoe someone bought, the best way to take care of the style, and whether the consumer bought accessories such as double socks or cleaning polish. The data takes the consumer on a journey through the lifetime of the shoes.

“It’s really difficult to know when someone is the same person, especially those who use more than one email address,” he said. “The best customers typically shop with multiple email addresses. These consumers show with the brand or retailer multiple times, but they have a different data trail.”

AI allows the brand to link together all the data. In a test during the first 10 days of working with a brand, Amperity managed to find 24% more high-value customers inside their data. Those people represented between 60% and 70% of revenue.

Biboud-Lubeck said Dr. Martens does not use agentic technology, but Amperity is testing it with other companies. Agentic makes it very easy to predict customer behavior, he said.

“A lot of our R&D is going into AI,” he said. “There’s nothing we could launch today that would allow AI to launch autonomously without controls, despite AI being used as identity.”