Uncovering Market-Insights for Charles & Keith

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Sponsor's Background

CHARLES & KEITH GROUP was co-founded by siblings Charles and Keith Wong. The CHARLES & KEITH GROUP consists of brands namely Charles and Keith, Charles and Keith Signature Label and Pedro. For the scope of the project, we will be focusing on the brand Charles and Keith(C&K) in the China Market. C&K produces an innovative footwear line that focuses on clear design aesthetic in order to cater to the preferences of the modern women. The company is renowned to be one of the prominent fast-fashion lifestyle retailers due to its strong following. Currently, C&K has expanded its product range and diversified into different product categories. The products range from ladies footwear, in house designers bags to accessories, such as belts, sunglasses, bracelets and tech accessories. Impressive international presence on the global front can be attributed to its successful venture into prominent shopping districts in Tokyo, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Cairo, Dubai (Charles & Keith Brand Profile, n.d.).

Motivation

Mainland China’s fast fashion industry has been expanding rapidly, with its customer base increasing at an exponential rate. (NLambassade, 2014). With the increasing income and rising standard of living of its citizens, China potentially provides the largest consumer market in this industry (SCMP, 2015). According to Euromonitor, the forecasted growth of women’s footwear in China is expected to reach 249.3 Billion CNY by 2019, more than 50% of the entire footwear industry in China.

Having spoken to Charles (CEO), the company plans to focus on its China market by strengthening its foothold in the various cities. Hence, the forecasted growth in the women’s footwear category is exciting news for the company. Presently, there are up to 95 franchised C&K stores spread across various cities in China. Given the intense competition posed by Multinational Companies (MNCs) and the domestic Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), it is increasingly important for C&K to grasp a better understanding of its China market. However, the different economic, social and demographical characteristics of these China cities has made it extremely complex for the business to fully understand the local buying preferences. Hence, the application data-analytics would be especially useful for C&K to uncover local market insights, through which enable itself to strengthen its competitive advantage via the implementation of improved business strategies. Currently, C&K does not allocate much of its resources into data analytics because much of its resources are tied down to the running of its daily logistics and operations, as well as, for its overseas expansions. The only area where data analytics is being applied is on its supply chain and inventory management. However, Charles has a keen interest in exploring data analytics in more areas of its business in the near future. Hence, our group believes that this project can serve as a good way for C&K to jump start its exploration into the field of marketing data-analytics.�

Project Objectives

The objectives mainly involves:

1. To inspect and clean transaction data to obtain a clear understanding of C&K’s overall business outlook in China
2. To provide visualisations on crucial business aspects in Mainland China using visualisation tools
3. To analyse the overall generic consumer purchasing patterns within Mainland China
4. To discover useful information and insights of their business to support possible business decisions (e.g expansion, production, product design decisions )