Redlands, California—May 21, 2012—Ascena Retail Group, Inc., is a leading specialty retailer of apparel for both women and tween girls in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Ascena's dressbarn, maurices, and Justice brands are focused on meeting the needs and preferences of three distinct audiences. To continue tailoring fashion offerings for its growing customer base, strengthen its brands, and more effectively determine the success of retail sites, Ascena is integrating Esri GIS analysis tools, demographic data, and map visualization into its business processes. Esri technology helps Ascena follow a customer centric approach for store development and market planning. It also helps the company identify key demographics and store profiles for each location to stratify and segment the brands. Ascena Retail Group uses GIS to quickly assess the suitability of sites and market potential, streamlining the development process and reducing the cost and time to bring projects to completion.

"Working with Esri is helping our company maintain its distinct market presence across brands and reinforce the specialty store experience throughout its 2,500 locations," says Kevin Ryks, director of financial planning, Maurices Incorporated. "We have found that each brand can be successful in very different and unique types of markets."

Esri spatial analysis helps Ascena quickly assess the suitability of potential store locations and their market potential by viewing possible sites and information about them, such as square footage, what is around them, and the socioeconomic makeup of the community. This analysis is a key element of the ongoing development, evolution, and growth of the brands and store footprint.

"Ascena Retail Group's character and success expresses the same values its founder, Roslyn Jaffe, and her husband defined in the 1960s—a reputation for quality, style, value, and customer service," says Simon Thompson, global director of commercial industry, Esri. "In a world where society and its priorities continually change, GIS is a powerful tool to help Ascena respond to these evolutionary trends."

For more information on Esri and how its GIS technology and data can help retailers, visit esri.com/retail.

###

About Esri

Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS technology, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at esri.com/news.