CRM, AI and Personalization: Desigual Focuses on Customer Relevance
Aleksandra Olszewska, directrice commerciale et digitale de Desigual
But as shoppers move between stores, websites, apps and social platforms - and as artificial intelligence makes personalisation possible at a previously unimaginable scale - the bigger challenge is deciding what is actually worth saying, according to Aleksandra Olszewska, Chief Commercial & Digital Officer at Desigual. She will be a keynote speaker at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show Europe.
“The biggest evolution has been moving from CRM as a unidirectional communication tool to CRM as a way of building much deeper relationships with our customers,” Olszewska said.
The shift reflects the fashion brand’s broader repositioning and its increasingly diverse customer base across countries, generations and channels. A mass-market approach to communication becomes harder to justify when customers have very different needs, behaviours and expectations.
“Increasingly, the question is not simply, ‘What do we want to tell our customers?’ but ‘What is relevant for this particular customer at this particular moment?’” Olszewska said.
She stresses that this requires moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach towards increasingly segmented and personalised relationships, while preserving Desigual’s distinctive brand personality.
“Our CRM has evolved from managing communications to managing relevance. Data helps us replace assumptions with a much better understanding of how customers actually behave,” she said.
“In fashion, we have traditionally been very good at intuition: understanding trends, product, creativity and what might inspire the consumer. Data doesn't replace any of that. What it does is complement it.”
While data has been available to retailers for years, Olszewska notes that the challenge has been processing and activating huge volumes of information at scale in a highly personalised way. Artificial intelligence is adding another layer.
“With AI we now increasingly have the possibility to personalise not only what we communicate but also how we communicate it,” Olszewska said. “For us it is all about changing models, adapting styling, giving customers all the body shapes.”
The objective is not to bombard customers with increasingly sophisticated messages, but rather to make communications more useful and deliver “less noise and more relevancy.”
However, despite years of predictions that email is becoming obsolete, it remains one of Desigual’s most important CRM channels.
“There has been a lot of talk over the years about email becoming obsolete, but for us it remains one of the most important channels to build an ongoing relationship with our customers,” Olszewska said.
The difference is in how the channel is used. Instead of simply increasing frequency, Desigual is focusing on relevance, personalisation and timing. SMS also remains valuable because it offers immediacy and strong visibility and is less expensive than WhatsApp as a CRM channel, making it particularly useful when timing is critical.
“WhatsApp is powerful, but we’re selective about it,” Olszewska said. “It’s a very personal space, so the bar for relevance has to be much higher. We don’t want every marketing message to become a WhatsApp message. Our priority is not to keep adding channels. It’s to orchestrate them better: understanding which customer should receive which message, through which channel, and at what moment.”
She is equally interested in what AI can do behind the scenes, including identifying patterns in customer behaviour, improving segmentation and helping teams make sense of increasingly complex datasets, though she emphasises caution.
“I think we need to be careful not to confuse personalisation with creativity,” Olszewska warned. “AI can help us decide which customer should see which story, but as a fashion brand, we still need to create stories that people actually want to see. AI can help us scale relevance, but it shouldn't standardise creativity.”
As retailers gain more sophisticated capabilities to understand customers, they also face a more fundamental question: “When does personalisation become creepy?” she added. For Olszewska, the answer starts with a simple principle.
“Personalisation has to create value for the customer, not just value for the company. Consumers understand that brands use data. What they are much less comfortable with is when they don't understand why something is happening or when personalisation becomes intrusive,” Olszewska said.
“I think the underlying consumer expectation is remarkably similar: if I give you access to my data, use it responsibly and give me something valuable in return.”
First-party data has long been a priority for Desigual. The company launched its loyalty programme well before some of its biggest fashion rivals and has spent years gathering customer information through its physical and digital stores.
“We have been gathering our customer and visitor data in our physical and digital stores and are now continuing with these efforts, figuring out how to be more and more effective and efficient in the process,” she said. “We have an incredible array of new tools and opportunities at our fingertips. But the key is to test what actually moves the needle rather than assume what customers want.”
Desigual has already tested whether adapting its communications to different age groups through more mature models or different styling would improve performance.
“It didn’t,” Olszewska said. “What really mattered was showing the customer the right product. My advice to attendees in Paris would be to experiment constantly, measure the impact, and focus your investment on what genuinely changes customer behaviour. Don’t personalise for the sake of personalisation. Personalise what matters.”