Shoppable content is driving sales and innovation for Macy’s, with the legacy brand leveraging their own employees—and the model may work for others, too.

The biggest eCommerce challenge for Marc Mastronardi, EVP of business development at Macy’s Inc., is the “connection of bringing an experience into the shopping world.”

For the company, this meant rewarding their employees for sharing fashion items from the store through a proprietary editorial tool that provides employees insight into what items to shift based on season, store location and internal initiatives.

At Friday’s SXSW panel, ‘Why Storytelling Sells: Platform Purchasing Power,’ including James DeJulio, president and co-founder of Tongal, who built the platform, alongside Marc Mastronardi and Lauren Wilner from Macy’s Inc. spoke about how their Macy’s Style Crew program is an iterative and scalable solution to a problem many enterprise brands face.

At 18 months into the program, Macy’s Style Crew is a way for the 160-year-old brand to differentiate.

It’s open to anyone within the Macy’s organization, from sales associates to programmers to execs. So far, the program has 1,000 ambassadors from 40 states leading to an average order value of $175, with a single post netting up to $22k in sales.

“For us, our consumer is constantly changing,” said Lauren Wilner, Macy’s VP of business development, fashion. And what does that consumer expect? “It’s giving [the consumer] a voice, and speaking in an authentic voice.”

“The ability to transact simply is where everyone has to be, but the differentiator is: can you create an experience?” said Mastronardi.

Mastronardi summed up their presence as a healthy eCommerce entity while restating the challenge:

“We’re the 8th largest seller of anything on the internet. Making sure we maintain that momentum [. . .] is how you bring the editorial side, the experiential side, the moment that makes you stop and pause and want to be engaged in shopping with us.”

The paradigm shift, as Macy’s puts it, is to transform “from a company selling to people to people selling to people.”