Five years ago, J. Crew filed for bankruptcy. Thanks in part to its technology initiatives, the company is now making a steady comeback.
Fashion retailer J. Crew became a household name in the 2000s for its preppy-chic styles, but began seeing shrinking sales in 2015 leading to store closures and mass layoffs as it struggled to land with customers. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020, it nearly did the company in; it was among a slew of other retailers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
But five years later J. Crew has ditched that dismal episode and made a comeback. And Danielle Schmelkin, who became CIO in June of 2019 after eight years heading IT at luxury fashion brands Coach and Kate Spade, has played a key role in it, using the company’s technology operations to fuel a brand turnaround. In 2024, the company brought in an estimated $2.7 billion in sales, $600 million more than estimated annual sales during the pandemic. J. Crew Group, which owns J. Crew, Madewell and J. Crew Factory, currently operates more than 580 brick and mortar stores, up from 491 stores pre-pandemic.
Driving more than half of J. Crew’s current revenue is a technology ecosystem that Schmelkin built during her last five years in the CIO role. It’s designed to create faster, more personalized experiences to keep both employees and shoppers more engaged, and it’s self-fueling; the data science team she manages generates enough profit and cost savings to fully fund itself. “We spent the last several years really working on the foundation and rebuilding from the bottom up all of our customer experiences, as well as the solutions that power that,” Schmelkin said. “We spend a lot of time on how we can take signals from so many channels of information and create a solution that’s more simple and meaningful.”
Schmelkin’s led technology efforts that are highly visible to customers—new mobile apps for shoppers to browse and buy from J. Crew and Madewell, as well as AI-powered customization on its websites that suggest styles to customers based on previous browsing and purchase history. Together they’ve helped drive online engagement from 11% to 25% in just a year. Schmelkin has also helped bring that engagement to physical stores via an iOS app that allows sales associates to use customer profiles, which includes information such as purchase history and the customer’s favorites list, to create customized sales experiences. “We’ve been able to tie that online and offline journey together and arm our stylist with much more information so that they’re able to provide something that just was invisible before,” Schmelkin said.
But what’s been most instrumental has been the technology beyond what shoppers see.
For years now, J. Crew’s sales data has been somewhat inscrutable to its sales associates—who are not always trained on calculating “net sales dollars” or “conversion rate.” Schmelkin solved this issue with an AI chatbot that allows employees to ask understandable-to-humans questions about the company’s data—“How well did our turtle neck sweaters do at the Fifth Avenue store?” or “How did the impact of our celebrity campaign this year compare to last year’s?”
Schmelkin’s team also powers the order management and distribution for both online and in stores. For in-store solutions, she’s helped eliminate some of the manual work that goes into stocking a store with AI-powered prediction models that assess a store’s inventory and create formulas for each store, helping save time for associates who once had to track and analyze the clothing that goes in and out of each store.
Schmelkin has even gone a step forward in enhancing the restocking process into a revenue driver for physical stores by tracking browsing history in the direct and neighboring zip codes of each physical store and using that information to adjust how they are stocked. For example, if there were notable searches on J. Crew’s websites for outerwear near one of its physical stores, but that store hadn’t been carrying as much outerwear, inventory would be adjusted accordingly. “We’re taking signals that are much broader than just what you see from the actuals of a store, which has been really impactful,” Schmelkin said.
On top of the traditional IT team a CIO manages, Schmelkin also oversees a UX/UI team that works on digital design, a data science team and J. Crew’s internal AI lab called “Second Thread”—which helps to test and implement AI across the mentioned front-facing and behind the scene operations. Looking forward, Schmelkin sees the future of J. Crew in its ability to harness technology to ensure products and experiences become even more personalized and creative as the company faces inevitable challenges including newer, trendier players and macroeconomic uncertainties ahead.