CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 15, 2002 -- Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation solutions, today announced that The Spiegel Group (OTC: SPGLA) (Spiegel, Inc.), a leading international specialty retailer, will implement Endeca InFront, Endeca’s product for commerce and catalog solutions. The Guided Navigation functionality of InFront will provide consumers with a quick and easy way to shop for products on The Spiegel Group’s online sites, which include Spiegel Catalog (www.spiegel.com), Spiegel Outlet (www.ultimateoutlet.com), Eddie Bauer (www.eddiebauer.com), Eddie Bauer Home (www.eddiebauerhome.com), Eddie Bauer Outlet (www.eddiebaueroutlet.com) and Newport News (www.newport-news.com). For example, in one shopping experience, customers will be able to conveniently shop for a women’s bathing suit on the Eddie Bauer Outlet site and if there are no matches, they will be directed to matches on the Eddie Bauer site in a matter of sub-seconds. This capability, combining industry-leading search, navigation and dynamic merchandising, will give The Spiegel Group retailers like Eddie Bauer a true advantage in the highly competitive online retail space.
After an extensive category review of search and navigation technologies, The Spiegel Group selected Endeca to eliminate the frustrating "million or none" problem common to other retail sites, whereby users get uselessly long lists of search results or get "zero results found" without any explanation of how to proceed. Guided Navigation will help The Spiegel Group customers accurately find the items they are looking for by showing them the precise paths they can take to refine and explore their results.
"Endeca InFront is the only product equipped with the power and flexibility to offer our customers the convenience of robust search with Guided Navigation on all of our retail sites," said David Kardesh, senior vice president and chief information officer of The Spiegel Group. "In addition, InFront’s merchandising capability allows us to offer new, relevant purchase options while letting consumers know about bargains and sometimes-missed related items which might be of interest. All of these capabilities help us achieve our goals to enhance the overall shopping experience of our customers while increasing conversion rates."
Guided Navigation from Endeca eclipses conventional "query and response" approaches to search, which place the burden on users to be familiar with the data set, have an idea of what to look for and how to describe the item, and finally to structure a query in a way the system will understand. In contrast, Guided Navigation provides an intuitive interaction model that eliminates all irrelevant information, and dynamically provides customers with only relevant and valid product choices.
"Many online retailers need to look for ways to market and merchandise goods on multiple store fronts. The Spiegel Group was looking for a way to do this while also improving overall customer experience," said Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca. "Endeca InFront will enable The Spiegel Group to manage and present products in a way that helps customers find exactly what they are looking for so they can ultimately buy more. Our relationship with The Spiegel Group is another step toward reaching our goal to become the navigation and search technology of choice in the e-Commerce sector."
Endeca solutions help businesses across a variety of sectors like retail, financial services and business-to-business with applications that address the information overload problems associated with content and catalog management as well as enterprise information access and retrieval.
About Endeca
Endeca offers innovative Guided Navigation information delivery solutions for companies who need to integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve the business problems associated with information overload. Endeca technology is already at work for leading retail, financial services and business-to-business companies like Barnes & Noble.com, Fidelity Investments, Tower Records, Arrow Electronics, Putnam Investments and IHS Engineering. Endeca solutions empower users to explore and discover relevant relationships in data and find accurate and precise results with unprecedented speed. Patent-pending algorithms provide a scalable, Web-based infrastructure for data exploration, leading to highly relevant and meaningful results every time, and this technology can be applied across a wide-range of enterprise and customer applications including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytics, catalogs, directories, search and portal integration. Endeca is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA and is backed by leading venture capital firms including Ampersand Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. For more information, please visit www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.
About The Spiegel Group
The Spiegel Group is a leading international specialty retailer marketing fashionable apparel and home furnishings to customers through catalogs, about 570 specialty retail and outlet stores and e-commerce sites, including eddiebauer.com, newport-news.com and spiegel.com. The Spiegel Group's businesses include Eddie Bauer, Newport News, Spiegel Catalog and First Consumers National Bank. Investor relations information is available on The Spiegel Group Web site http://www.thespiegelgroup.com.