Personalized digital commerce for 40 markets

At a glance

• 51% increase in product views

• 9% increase in returning customers

• 64% increase in conversion rate

New site needed to optimize conversions

Founded in 1920, New Era Cap Company are the leading global headwear manufacturer producing more than 35 million caps per year. They are the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of the official on-field cap worn by every Major League Baseball team and their Minor League affiliates across the world. New Era have also developed a very strong identity on the street and is growing its brand into apparel and across new markets.

New Era approached Optimizely’s licensed partners twentysix in 2016 and Made to Engage in 2019 with the aim of fully utilising Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to increase their market share,  attract a wider and more varied customer demographic, and fashion a personalised, interactive online customer journey that increased both front-of-house conversion rates and backend operational efficiency.

The Challenges

New Era were keen to develop a new site for the EMEA region that represented the authenticity & individuality of the New Era brand as the existing site was outdated and not optimised for conversion.

New Era goals were to:

• develop a new site for the EMEA region that supported an interactive and rich media brand experience alongside a solid, high performance e-commerce platform optimised for conversion represented the authenticity & individuality of the New Era brand as the existing site was outdated and not optimised for conversion.
• Increase operational efficiency
• attract a wider customer demographic whilst growing its social footprint and engagement
• Increase conversion rates

The Solution

Twentysix (2016)

At the start of the 2016 project, twentysix conducted an extensive discovery phase, which included workshops and sessions with all the site stakeholders and audiences, both internal and external. The purpose of these sessions was to enable the project team to get under the skin of the market and its audience to ensure planning, creative and technical recommendations would firmly establish New Era as a market leader.

With all the information gathered, twentysix recommended the new EMEA e-commerce website was developed on the Optimizely Commerce platform. Key requirements leading to this recommendation were as follows:

• New Era needed a fully responsive website
• The journeys needed to feature rich product filtering and searching
• The platform needed to easily manage 11k+ product SKUs
• The global site would serve over 40 European markets in 5 languages using 2 currencies
• Utilising the Optimizely market management functionality to control the availability of products across various markets to implement country based licensing restrictions, ensuring products are only visible and eligible for purchase within the applicable countries
• Multiple shipping methods would be required per market with delivery exclusion rules
• The product catalogue and translation partner integration could be managed using Optimizely projects and Optimizely service API

During the build, the technical teams at New Era & twentysix worked closely together in integrating Optimizely Commerce with the range of back-end systems that New Era utilise.  Key integration points to ensure an end to end e-commerce experience were:

• SAP for New Era’s product and stock management
• MotionPoint for multi-lingual content based on user location
• Optimizely Product recommendations for recommendations based on user’s site journey
• IBM Marketing Cloud for ECRM activities including cart abandonment, marketing campaigns and special offers
• A custom cap builder microsite
• Multiple Payment gateways (SagePay & PayPal)

Made to Engage (2019-onwards)

UK Optimizely partner Made to Engage joined forces with New Era in 2019 with the focus on a holistic customer-focused campaign, maximising Optimizely’s full DXP suite to increase conversion rates and customer engagement.

User Interface

The potential to achieve dramatic results via a process of iterative change is perfectly illustrated by New Era Cap’s Optimizely experience. 

New Era worked with Made to Engage to completely overhaul the Product Listing Pages and Product Detail Pages for their EMEA website.

For their Product Listing Pages, New Era utilised Optimizely’s Search and Navigation product to quickly retrieve and order relevant products for customer queries. The Search and Navigation product also uses dynamic faceting capabilities to ensure that filtering options are kept up to date in real time while customers interact with the page.

New Era’s Product Detail Pages are integrated with Optimizely’s Commerce Cloud catalogue, pricing, inventory and cart management systems, allowing the company to maximise customer retention and optimise results.

Data & Experimentation 

Building on top of the company’s continued use of Optimizely’s Commerce Cloud and Content Cloud, New Era’s use of experimentation to iterate and test has allowed for rapid growth. By experimenting at speed and scale, New Era has experienced year-on-year growth in excess of 60%, with Black Friday sales rising by 123% in 2021 compared to 2020.