On the Radar is a new content series highlighting Radar's amazing customers and partners and their geolocation use cases, hosted by Radar Co-Founder and CEO Nick Patrick.
In today's episode, Nick chatted with Courtney Mackedanz, the Principal Product Manager for Digital and Performance Marketing at Five Below.
Read the full interview below:
Nick Patrick
All right, well welcome everyone to On the Radar. My name's Nick Patrick and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Radar, the leading geolocation platform. On the Radar is a new content series highlighting Radar's amazing customers and their geolocation use cases. And today I'm lucky to be joined by Courtney Mackedanz, Principal Product Manager for Digital and Performance Marketing at Five Below. Courtney, thanks so much for joining me.
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, thanks for having me, Nick. Excited to be here.
Nick Patrick
Awesome. Well Courtney, maybe to start you can tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and your company?
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, sure, I'd be happy to. So just a little bit about me. I've spent my career in several retail spaces from grocery to office supplies, general merchandising, and now I'm in the discount space. My background entails really straddling business and IT in various companies that I've worked in, helping to frame up strategies and deliver value from those initiatives.
Specific to Five Below, I've been leading the customer acquisition, mobile apps, and top funnel product space for nearly two years.
So leading into Five Below and a little bit about us, our business focuses on fun with the majority of our products priced at $5 or less. We do offer a select assortment in our five beyond category where great products are priced up to $25, which may be significantly more expensive elsewhere.
Providing alternatives to customers beyond $5 allows us to offer broader assortments at key periods during the year. Kind of like now with the holidays, right? And allows us to stay on trend while keeping true to our brand.
Nick Patrick
Well, I guess Courtney, I'd love to hear in general, why does geolocation matter to Five Below?
Courtney Mackedanz
It matters to us because, in the digital world, understanding what geographic location our customers are entering our website from in near real-time, and with relative accuracy, is critical to enabling our digital strategy at Five Below.
Location services allows us to present the best local store product assortment that is available to our customers when they enter fivebelow.com, providing shoppers with contextually relevant assortments based on their local store assignment.
So utilizing this technology helps us to remove friction from their digital shopping experience.
Nick Patrick
Awesome, that makes a lot of sense. It's hard to believe, but 2024 is almost over, so I'm curious to hear about your top priorities heading into 2025?
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, I'll speak specifically from a digital perspective. As we look at 2025, we're really focused on continuing to drive growth across our channels, web, mobile app, and omni. And so geolocation is part of that as we think about enabling the experience I just mentioned a bit earlier.
Nick Patrick
Yeah, that's great. We'd love to hear a little bit more about how Five Below is using Radar today?
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, as I had mentioned a moment ago, it's really core to our product display and discovery on our website. We leverage Radar's Geocoding API to quickly find a customer's location and assign them a nearby Five Below physical store. This rapid decision in conjunction with our inventory data helps customers build confidence in their purchasing decisions through surfacing what's available in their store for Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS). Additionally, it's the backbone of our store selector.
Without anchoring on a primary location, we would not have enough context for nearby stores that customers could alternatively select.
Nick Patrick
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So right place, right time content and web experiences. Would love to hear a little bit more about why you chose Radar over alternatives?
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, so there are really four key reasons why we chose Radar.
Nick Patrick
Yeah, that's great. I mean, our goal is to deliver a cost-effective solution and also kind of match or exceed the performance of other vendors, maybe unlock additional geolocation use cases beyond what folks are doing today and ultimately provide great support as well. So that's really awesome to hear.
There are a lot of possibilities with geolocation. We'd love to hear more about what you might hope to do with Radar in the future?
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, definitely lead in there, right, to the witness in terms of our future plans and sort of another reason why we selected you all as a partner. We are definitely evaluating other solutions offered by Radar and how they fit into our digital strategy.
There are some exciting offerings you have around geofencing, which I'm excited about having the mobile app, as well as increased maps functionality that we haven't yet tapped into to really help elevate the omni experience for our customers.
Nick Patrick
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
I think some of these map-based and kind contextual web experiences are a great starting point, but there are so many possibilities when it comes to other types of experiences powered by geolocation and geofencing as well.
Maybe it's sort of a parting thought. I would love to hear, you know, speaking about the future, what you hope to see from geolocation technology in your industry and the retail and e-commerce industry over the next five years.
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, I definitely thought about it from the context of where I sit today, right? In retail and digital. And there are two different thoughts that I had and kind of what I'd like to see. The first really leans on what I've been talking to and how we use it currently and having the ability to even more precisely target a customer's location. And so, I’m curious if there's any way that a radius could be more specific or include additional logic in the API response as a way to more precisely identify and assign the closest store to the customer? We're really close today, right? But anything more precise really helps us to deliver the best experience for our customers.
The second, I sort of thought in my mind, is around the store experience. So, we're omni and we have a big store presence, right? So if I think about stores, is there anything around a heat mapping experience to either inform the customer in-store journey pathing or associate pathing?
I’m thinking about this because it could help reduce or it could help to optimize POGs (or planograms) as we talk about them, I started using acronym… and overall merchandising strategies that we employ to help customers more quickly find the products that they're looking for at a localized and personalized level. Additionally, I think there's a way it could help with optimizing in-store shelf management for our associates creating efficiencies for the team so they could spend more time with the customers and less time finding items or stocking the shelves.
Nick Patrick
That's great. Yeah, we've seen a lot of interest recently in really precise in-store and on-premise experiences, and I think that coupled with really frictionless, maybe IPG or location-based web experiences. Again, I think you said it earlier, it’s all about the right place, right time, contextual experiences, helping the customer get what they want and get it quickly. So that's really great.
Well, Courtney, thank you so much for doing this. This was fun. Thanks for coming On the Radar. Really appreciate it!
Courtney Mackedanz
Yeah, thank you. It's been great, Nick.
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