Commercial Counsel

Catalyst Brands moves off legacy martech stack to power 1:1 personalization across its portfolio. Attentive(R), the omnichannel marketing platform for retailers, apparel brands, and e-commerce companies redefining how brands and people connect through relevant personalized experiences, announced that Catalyst Brands, the recently formed parent company of JCPenney, Aeropostale, Brooks Brothers, and other leading retailers, has transitioned to Attentive's omnichannel platform for SMS, email, push, and AI-powered decisioning. This migration reflects a broader transformation within the retail industry, as the traditional martech model, characterized by fragmentation, high costs, and a lack of purpose-built AI, becomes obsolete. Nearly half (47%) of marketing leaders cite their current stack as a barrier to value, according to McKinsey. Attentive delivers a leaner, consolidated approach that prioritizes data clarity, revenue and connection, making it possible for marketers to drive real-time personalized experiences at scale. Catalyst Brands' predecessor organization began working with Attentive in 2020 and expanded the relationship in March 2025 to include the entire Catalyst Brands portfolio on Attentive's omnichannel platform. The migration to Attentive consolidated billions of customer interactions across all Catalyst brands into a single platform, removing the need for multiple point solutions and CDP dependencies, and delivering efficiencies that resulted in annual cost savings. From fragmentation to consolidation. "When bringing together five distinct businesses under the newly formed Catalyst Brands, we had a rare opportunity to reimagine our marketing technology from the ground up," said Marika Bigler, Vice President, Customer Growth and Loyalty at Catalyst Brands. "By consolidating on Attentive, we replaced a complex system with a single, easier-to-manage platform that reduces overhead and enables more personalized customer engagement across every brand." With Attentive, Catalyst Brands is redefining personalized messaging across its portfolio of companies through: * Unified Omnichannel Engagement: Catalyst Brands moved all portfolio brands to Attentive's omnichannel platform for email, push, and SMS, reducing costs while unlocking stronger cross-brand and cross-channel customer engagement opportunities. With a more unified view of each shopper, Catalyst Brands can deliver more personalized messages in the channel most likely to drive engagement. * Agentic AI to Scale Personalized Customer Engagement: Catalyst Brands is leveraging Attentive's agentic AI solutions, including AI Pro and AI Grow, to personalize messaging in real time and convert more visitors into subscribers across its portfolio. Acting on real-time customer signals, Attentive's AI agents determine who to message, what to say, when to send it, and which channel is likely to perform best for all customers across all of Catalyst's portfolio brands. * Mobile-First Identity for Better Customer Experiences: Attentive's mobile-first identity gives Catalyst Brands a more accurate way to recognize customers across devices and interactions, creating a unified view of each customer. By connecting behavioral signals, purchase activity, and customer profiles around a customer's mobile device, Catalyst Brands gains a more detailed understanding of each customer and can deliver more personalized experiences across channels and brands. * Enterprise-Scale Migration: Attentive successfully transitioned customer messages and data points for Catalyst Brands to its unified platform, with the migration managed entirely by Attentive and supported by a dedicated customer success team. "The legacy retail martech model centered around a CRM and stitched together with point solutions is no longer delivering the performance retailers need," said Amit Jhawar, CEO of Attentive. "This outdated model is expensive, complex, and not designed for AI. Catalyst Brands saw an opportunity to reimagine what their martech stack could deliver. By consolidating their stack on Attentive, they're moving beyond fragmented technology to unlock the full potential of AI-powered personalization, driving higher-performing campaigns and greater revenue." About Attentive. Attentive is the omnichannel marketing platform redefining how brands and people connect. Trusted by leading global retail and e-commerce brands and high-growth consumer companies, Attentive's mobile foundation gives marketers a stronger signal for recognizing customers, personalizing messaging, and delivering performance across SMS, email, RCS, and push. Its intelligence layer and agentic AI unify customer profiles and act on real-time data, giving marketers what they need to turn messages into moments that drive action, revenue, and loyalty. About Catalyst Brands. Catalyst Brands ignites America's most beloved retail brands to make fashion accessible to all. Its portfolio features legendary department store JCPenney, as well as iconic specialty retail brands Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Lucky Brand, and Nautica. Established in 2025, when JCPenney and the former SPARC Group combined, Catalyst Brands today operates 1,800 retail stores, shop-in-shops, and eCommerce platforms throughout the U.S. and Canada. It also serves leading wholesale accounts in North America and beyond.

Attentive announced the release of new AI Pro and AI reporting functionality. Search. Frye reports 13% overall revenue lift with Attentive AI Pro Suite Attentive(R), the omnichannel marketing platform for retailers, apparel brands and e-commerce companies redefining how brands and people connect through relevant, personalized experiences, today announced the next generation of its agentic AI marketing solutions with Lifecycle Intelligence, a new set of capabilities within Attentive AI Pro. Lifecycle Intelligence helps marketers better understand customer behavior, value and product interests throughout their journey, enabling smarter decisions about who to reach and how to engage them. Lifecycle Intelligence includes three new capabilities: * Product Affinity: Now generally available to AI Pro customers, Product Affinity enables marketers to build dynamic audiences around customer interest in specific products and categories. * Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM): Available to AI Pro customers in beta, RFM provides a clearer picture of how recently and how often customers buy, and how much they spend. * Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Available to AI Pro customers in beta, Customer LTV allows brands to understand what customers have spent and what they may spend over time, helping marketers determine where to focus retention efforts. Lifecycle Intelligence helps marketers make sense of the countless signals they receive from customers, while Attentive's agentic AI simultaneously acts on signals such as customer interests, behaviors and value to keep audience segments current and campaign delivery highly relevant. "Marketers now have endless data points from their customers and have been begging for an engine that learns from and acts on those signals for years, but the technology just wasn't there until recently," said Eric Miao, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Product Officer at Attentive. "Attentive AI is helping brands understand their customers and their interests more clearly. That deeper understanding can drive revenue lift while creating stronger, more meaningful relationships over time." How Brands Are Using AI Pro to Drive Measurable Results Brands are already seeing measurable results with Attentive AI Pro. Frye US has embraced the broader AI Pro suite to unlock incremental revenue, with a 13% overall revenue lift. AI Pro also helped Flag & Anthem recognize more shoppers and connect more behavior to real customer profiles, giving the brand more opportunities to trigger relevant messages based on what shoppers were browsing, abandoning, or showing interest in. This led to a 28% lift in additional people identified for follow-up, 7% more incremental sign-ups, and a 20% increase in abandonment journey revenue. "We have so many different customer interests across the brand - golf, western-inspired styles, everyday apparel, women's, and more. There's a big opportunity to segment more thoughtfully and send customers the content they actually want to see," said Beth Tusso, Senior Director of Marketing, Flag & Anthem. Expanding AI Across the Marketing Workflow Attentive is also expanding AI across more of the marketer's workflow with Reporting Agent and Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities, both available in beta. Reporting Agent gives marketers a conversational way to ask questions about their Attentive program, quickly understand what changed and why, and surface recommendations for next steps in minutes. MCP enables marketers to securely connect external AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude with Attentive, with over 70 tools currently available in beta to streamline campaign creation, audience building, reporting and more. For brands like Spiraledge, the MCP is already making it faster and easier to get answers about program performance without relying on manual reporting. "If I have a question about our email and SMS program, I can go and answer it myself at whatever depth that I need right now, and I can do this in a few minutes." Adam Hayim, Chief Marketing Officer, Spiraledge.