How Bloch uses Lexer to turn customer data into smarter marketing

Bloch is the world's leading provider of technical dance footwear, apparel, and activewear. Founded in Sydney in 1932 by Jacob Bloch with a promise to make the most comfortable dance shoes in the world, the brand has spent more than 90 years listening to dancers and refining its craft. Today, Bloch supplies the world's most elite dance companies, including the Royal Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Australian Ballet. Every pointe shoe is still made by hand.

That heritage is a real advantage. It also creates a real complexity: a passionate, highly engaged customer base that shops across multiple channels, across multiple product categories, and through retail stores and ecommerce in equal measure. Understanding who those customers are, where they shop, what they buy, and how much they are worth, requires more than gut feel.

The challenge: data everywhere, insight nowhere

Before Lexer, Bloch had no unified view of their customers. Data was scattered across their ERP system, their Shopify store, and Klaviyo, sitting in separate silos with no common thread.

Sabina describes the approach before Lexer as "spray and pray." The data existed, but it was not connected in a way that made it usable for targeted decision-making. Bloch needed a platform that could bring everything together into one place and make it usable for a lean marketing team, without requiring a data science background.

What Bloch uses Lexer for

1. A single source of truth across ERP, Shopify, and Klaviyo

Lexer now serves as Bloch's central source of customer truth. The platform unifies data from Bloch's ERP system, their Shopify store, and Klaviyo into a single customer data platform, giving the marketing and merchandising teams a consistent, real-time view of every customer.

This was not a simple integration. Bloch runs a custom legacy ERP system which many platforms struggle to connect with. Despite initial scepticism about whether it could be done, Lexer's team worked through the technical requirements directly with Bloch's developers, with communication adapted to suit both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Sabina describes the onboarding as "quite seamless" and highlights that Lexer staff adjusted the way they communicated depending on whether they were speaking to marketing or developers.

The result is a platform that the whole business can use. Marketing builds segments and runs campaigns. The merchandising team could pull quick transaction reports and Average Order Value (AOV) stats rather than running reports through the ERP. 

2. Precision segmentation through Klaviyo integration

Before Lexer, building an audience for an email or SMS campaign meant working with broad database lists. Now, Bloch builds precise segments in Lexer based on customer behaviour, purchase history, and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) data, then exports those audiences directly to Klaviyo for activation.

In Sabina's words:

This capability sits at the heart of how Bloch runs its customer segmentation. Rather than sending to everyone and hoping for the best, the team now communicates with specific groups of customers based on what those customers have actually done.

3. A Black Friday SMS campaign that returned 6,000% ROI

The impact of precise segmentation became clear during Black Friday. SMS is a higher-cost channel than email, and sending to an entire database quickly becomes expensive. Bloch used Lexer to build a specific, targeted segment, then exported that audience to Klaviyo for the SMS send.

The result: a 6,000% return on investment from that single campaign.

"We built that segment in Lexer, exported it to Klaviyo," says Sabina, "and we had an ROI of 6,000%."

We know why this is the case. A broad SMS sent to a large, unqualified list produces average results at a high cost. A precise send to a carefully built segment, informed by real purchase behaviour and engagement history, produces dramatically better returns.

4. Uncovering the true value of multi-channel customers

One of the most significant findings Bloch has made using Lexer is the spending gap between customers who shop across multiple channels and those who only shop through one.

Sabina puts it plainly: "The industry standard for a multi-channel customer is that they spend 1.7 times more than a single channel customer. At Bloch, they're spending 2.7 times the amount of a single channel shopper."

This insight has changed how Bloch thinks about its retail and ecommerce strategy. Customers who shop both in-store and online are dramatically more valuable, and the data now makes that visible. The priority is to understand what drives multi-channel behaviour and how to encourage single-channel customers to cross over.

This kind of analysis, identifying which customer segments drive the most lifetime value, sits at the core of what a retail customer data platform makes possible.

5. Fair measurement of customer competition

Bloch ran a customer competition across their store network and needed to find a way to identify which stores were successfully pushing the competition. The natural instinct is to measure by total entries, but that approach skews heavily towards flagship stores with higher foot traffic, making it an unreliable indicator of which stores were actually driving engagement.

The more meaningful measure was the ratio of competition entries relative to total transactions at each store: how many customers who visited actually entered, regardless of how busy the store was. Lexer made it possible to calculate that ratio across every location and surface the stores where staff were genuinely moving the needle.  

This kind of analysis sits beyond what most marketing platforms can produce on their own. Lexer made it possible to connect transaction data with competition entries across locations and draw a meaningful, like-for-like comparison between stores of very different sizes. 

What it takes to make it work

Sabina's advice to other brands is practical: the platform requires only a few hours of work per week to generate value, but clear objectives matter. The five KPIs established at kickoff kept the Bloch team focused and made it easier to track what the platform was delivering.

She recommends having one internal champion who understands the platform and can build segments, and ensuring other teams, like merchandising, know the tool is available to them. Lexer also supports collaboration between Bloch's marketing team and their paid media agency. The more people using the data, the more value it generates.

Book a demo

Ready to see what Lexer can do for your retail business? Book a demo and we will show you how brands like Bloch are using customer data to run smarter campaigns and grow customer lifetime value.

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Author Note: Contributing spokesperson Sabina Moten no longer works at Bloch.