Gone Shopping
Macy’s Home Store was approached by the bridal team in 2006 with a request
to create a greater sense of cohesion and community for its 3,000+ bridal sales
associates across North America. At the time, they were still working through
integration issues related to their various acquisitions as they made the transitionfrom long-standing regional to newly-minted national brand. “It was certainly
a challenging time,” said Verma, ”particularly since we were also planning a
new division intranet that would facilitate communication across our new units
as well as streamline business processes.”
The challenge was no sooner laid down than the Home Store team began
investigating options for transforming this business request into a larger
experiment for deploying video, a much-needed and heretofore missing
technology at the company.
“We knew that we couldn’t wait any longer on streaming,” said Verma. “There
couldn’t be a ‘better’ time. We had just gone national and there was an incredible
sense of possibility across the entire company.” Verma also knew that in order
to win big, they had to start small with a project that was nonetheless exciting
and high-profile enough to draw attention.