Carhartt Work in Progress
Accompanying a strong brand in e-commerce
Executive Summary
The Client
Carhartt WIP generates annual sales of around €100 million euro from its own fashion collections. The urban fashion label has more than 40 own stores worldwide and is also selling through over 2,500 trading partners.
The Challenge
The fashion label wanted to combine the brand website and the web shop and replace existing on-premise software with a flexible, scalable e-commerce cloud solution to save on the costs of feature upgrades and maintenance work.
The Solution
With the API-based commercetools™ cloud platform, Carhartt WIP opted for innovative, agile shop technology. The “E-Commerce” and “PIM” platform modules were integrated with additional third-party systems.
The Result
The commercetools platform has led to a significant reduction in operating costs. Only several months after the launch of the new platform, Carhartt WIP could tell that site visitors are also now staying much longer on the company web pages thanks to the content strategy.
Inspiration & High-Quality Content:
International Marketing Platform for Carhartt WIP
Carhartt WIP is strengthening its brand and online activities with the relaunch of its international e-commerce website, high-quality content and technology provided by commercetools™.
Carhartt WIP decided to consolidate its online presence and tap into new sales channels. The aim was to eliminate the separation of the brand website on the one hand and the web shop on the other to offer customers a uniform presence as part of a content-commerce strategy. Moreover, an analysis of the existing on-premise solution indicated that the strategic goals could only be achieved by replacing it with more up-to-date systems.
There were several key reasons for this:
Cost: It was going to be very expensive to migrate to a newer version of the existing E-Commerce solution. Furthermore, it was foreseeable that the planned growth could only be supported by additional license fees and investment in additional hardware.
Flexibility: The company expressed a desire for more flexibility when implementing its own functionalities. This was particularly relevant in terms of merging the content and e-commerce elements to create a uniform customer experience, optimize the branding and make the online sales process more efficient.
Omnichannel: The company expressed a desire for more flexibility when implementing its own functionalities. This was particularly relevant in terms of merging the content and e-commerce elements to create a uniform customer experience, optimize the branding and make the online sales process more efficient.
Scalability: Cloud technology was chosen as providing an innovative, future-proof solution with sufficient scalability in the face of rising revenues and visitor numbers.
Internationalization: Carhartt WIP sells its products worldwide and keeps opening up new markets: The collections are currently offered in 26 countries, in 5 languages and in 8 currencies.
The solution: Tried and tested combination of e-commerce system and CMS
In order to reflect these customer requirements in the best possible way, the company opted for the “E-Commerce” and “Product Information Management” modules from the commercetools™ cloud platform with Bloomreach Experience Manager (formerly Hippo™) as the content management system.
The commercetools platform offered an innovative, API-based approach, which allows for a lot of flexibility in the integration of third-party systems. This made it easy to integrate systems such as Payone™ for payment and Microsoft Dynamics AX™ (Navision) as an ERP system, as well as Amplience™ for digital asset management and epoq™ as a recommendation engine. Another crucial factor for Carhartt WIP was the fact that as a cloud-based system commercetools, unlike the existing monolithic SAP hybris™ system, is constantly updated and automatically scales up at no additional cost.
The particular advantage of Bloomreach Experience Manager (formerly Hippo™) was the ability to create and control personalized content. For both systems, commercetools already provides a standard connector that can be used by the customer with very few modifications required.
Content-First
The most important decision in planning the project was how Carhartt WIP could create and control the content of the new web presence going forward to meet the high requirements of its brand communications. The company therefore decided on a content-first strategy with the CMS as the leading system: All pages, from the so-called lookbooks to the product detail pages, are centrally managed by Carhartt WIP using the CMS, and then presented to customers. In the background, the commercetools platform administers all the E-Commerce processes and supplies the CMS with all the necessary data via a bi-directional connector.
The project
The implementation project was carried out in several stages by all involved parties.
Phase 1: The frontend implementation and the design were conceptualized in this phase. The team also defined the necessary interfaces and the data model for the products.
Phase 2: The relaunch was subsequently implemented with the support of a team consisting of up to ten people representing the various project parties. In addition to the purely technical issues, there were also organizational changes: For example, the processes for generating and enriching content and for image production were optimized to enable customers to access a high-quality customer experience on both desktop and mobile devices.
Phase 3: At the end of the project, there was a comprehensive test phase and the launch of the new e-commerce website.
Visual design & User Experience
Working with Nation Studio from London to bring Carhartt WIP's e-commerce experience firmly up to date across all devices.
The results
Following the relaunch, Carhartt WIP now has a modern, mobile-enabled (responsive) website, which provides a perfect showcase for the brand, inviting customers to shop online. In addition to its clear user guidance, the online shop particularly impresses with its convenient product variety handling and its clear checkout. Features such as multi-selective filters and infinite scrolling guarantee that the visitor will enjoy an intuitive and fast shopping experience.
In the “journal” section, the articles and looks mentioned in the blogs and shown in the film sequences can be ordered directly online using the Quick Shop function. The customer can find additional inspiration in the “lookbooks”, where the current collections are presented and are also immediately available for purchase.
The Carhartt WIP Radio Player underscores the company’s close association with music. It offers playlists on various themes, events and music styles, so users can choose their favorites and listen while browsing.
Homepage: The brand is presented through large-scale teaser images, links to the relevant product areas and teasers that lead to the journal. Visitors can also get an overview of the store with one simple click.
Lookbooks: Elaborate product photography is used to display looks at their best. These can then be easily bought online.
Journal: The Carhartt WIP brand and its brand ambassadors regularly publish event reports, news and interesting facts about the brand and activities in the fields of music, skateboarding and collaborations.
Stores: The company stores present themselves with high-quality pictures and useful additional information. It is also possible to search for trading partners using a map application.
Just a few months after the launch, the fashion label noted the following:
Cost reduction: The licensing and operating costs of the new platform are substantially lower than those that would have been incurred for the continuation of the previous on-premise solution.
Higher average stay: After the relaunch and the merging of the marketing website and the web shop, the stay time on the individual pages rose sharply.