Unlocking new customers outside their lane
What non-traditional fashion audiences taught High Life about growth
The fastest growing customer wasn’t behaving like a traditional fashion customer. And Scintilla was really what allowed us to see that, act on it, and find the results.
High Life knew activewear, but finding their next growth opportunity meant looking beyond the category. When non-fashion shopping missions began outpacing activewear-related ones, the team targeted these shoppers with Walmart Connect campaigns, expanding beyond activewear to reach a broader, unexpected audience.
The opportunity: Finding growth outside the fashion aisle
While exploring shopping missions in Scintilla’s Performance in Detail report, High Life noticed something surprising. Some of their fastest growth was coming from customers on shopping journeys with no obvious connection to fashion. Those nontraditional missions were outpacing their core active business across customer growth, sales growth, and spend per customer.
The finding opened a larger opportunity. Instead of looking at customers solely through the lens of the fashion category, High Life could understand how Reebok fit into their broader Walmart shopping journey.
The approach: Validate, test, and scale
Before changing their strategy, High Life used multiple Scintilla modules to determine whether the initial signal represented a meaningful customer opportunity.
Shopper Behavior surfaced the shopping missions and helped confirm recurring cross-category behavior through basket analysis. Customer Perception provided another layer, validating that customer mindsets aligned with what High Life was seeing in the behavioral data. Channel Performance connected those insights to sales performance, while the Best Customers report in Shopper Behavior helped the team track customer growth and loyalty over time.
With multiple signals pointing in the same direction, High Life brought the insight to Walmart Connect.
The High Life team began shifting a small portion of their display budget beyond their traditional audience of brand-loyal repeat apparel purchasers. They tested segments with no obvious relationship to apparel and let performance determine whether they deserved more investment.
After just a few iterations, those test segments became some of High Life’s top-performing audiences for return on ad spend. Campaign after campaign, the team increased investment in the audiences that performed well.
What began as a “moonshot” ultimately became a core pillar of High Life’s year-round audience strategy, with their digital assortment evolving alongside it.
The results: New customers with greater value
The new strategy helped High Life reach customers they’d never targeted before—and their value extended beyond acquisition. New buyers came in through previously untapped segments, including customers shopping across the store and customers new to Walmart. Loyal customers spent more season over season, while newly acquired customers proved more valuable than High Life’s traditional customer set. They also engaged with the brand more often, making more trips across more of the year.
The impact extended beyond Reebok. Research showed that when customers added Reebok to their baskets, they also spent more on Walmart private brands, creating value across the broader Walmart business.
Together, the gains in customer growth, spend, and frequency showed that High Life had uncovered more than a short-term opportunity. They had identified a new source of sustained growth.
