C&A: rethinking retail and driving digitalization 10 Closed stores, open minds The Coronavirus intensely transformed the global trends, dividing the market into winners and losers of the transformation battle. For winners such as C&A, making progress in ecommerce is imminent, and that might affect consumer behavior in the future. Ecommerce is becoming a substitute source to provide goods that usually consumers bought in superstore traditionally. Mobile apps are known to change and actually improve the way retailers interact with their customers. They increase customer retention and loyalty, helping to provide sales support, which is now ever more crucial with the ongoing pandemic closing down the physical stores. You can give users a better customer experience, despite the absence of the ‘sensory’ component. Apps loading time is faster than mobile sites. C&A’s mobile application has been one of the download leaders in the fashion category. A very important thing to mention is the success of the app since the coronavirus hit in early 2020: it grew from 500k users in March to 4M in December. With the shopping experience built entirely on top of VTEX APIs, it pushed for a significant increase in sales, and also in the visibility of the brand. Today, the app already represents more than 50% of C&A’s digital sales and is the most downloaded fashion app in Brazil. The crisis certainly challenged C&A to work better. The team organized itself into working groups that sought to solve customer problems. And they organized into multifunctional groups aimed at solving the customer’s issues. C&A had a high impact on the way the customer buys on the website or in the mobile application. However, the fulfillment happens in one of the stores at that time functioning as Dark Store and delivered to the customer’s home. Even with the stores closed, this feature allowed C&A to monitor and deliver from its stock to all customers. Only this time, everything was handled digitally—through omnichannel.