Aurora-owned fashion retailer Karen Millen has followed its sister fascia Oasis in launching a SMS gift voucher service to capitalise on growing consumer appetite for mobile vouchers.

Karen Millen customers can purchase the gift vouchers online through a section on the website, www.mobilekarenmillen.com, in values of £10 to £300. Vouchers can be redeemed in-store by showing the text message with a unique code, sent to the consumers’ phones, to sales staff.

The retailer has worked with mobile voucher provider Eagle Eye Solutions and its EPoS provider BT Expedite on the system.

The convenience of mobile vouchers has been seen by Oasis’s success with its SMS gift voucher service launched in December last year. Oasis now sells three times as many SMS vouchers as paper and plastic vouchers online.

Parent company Aurora Fashions group IT director John Bovill, said: “By using new mobile technology, not only can we make the shopping experience more accessible to the challenging demands of daily life, but the data captured offers unprecedented levels of insight into consumer behaviour. In addition, because Eagle Eye Solutions’ mobile vouchers use our existing EPoS and Chip & PIN systems, we have not had to make any new investment of changes to our in-store IT infrastructure.”