R.M. Williams challenge century-old opinions with testing

For a brand that's been making boots for over 90 years, R. M. Williams has strong opinions about what it stands for. So does everyone in the head office. The challenge for Maija Frankovich, Digital Experience Manager, wasn't a lack of ideas — it was proving which ones were right.

Four years ago, R. M. Williams partnered with Deloitte and Optimizely to build an experimentation program from scratch. The goal wasn't a specific KPI. It was something harder: creating a culture where data, not the highest-paid person's opinion, drives decisions. For a heritage brand with passionate internal stakeholders, that meant using experiments to prove or disprove long-held beliefs about the brand, the customer, and what actually works online.

The program has since evolved from culture change into a full-funnel testing operation. The team tests everything from homepage messaging and campaign concepts to major product page redesigns — monitoring engagement, conversion, and completed orders across every experiment. When R. M. Williams launched its boot discovery project, a complete redesign of its product and listing pages, they used Optimizely to run a guided tour that brought customers along the journey — driving positive engagement and uplift in completed orders where previous big redesigns had tanked KPIs.

Now, with Agent Platform helping with result summaries and idea generation, and conversational AI-powered search on the horizon, R. M. Williams is pushing the program further. But Maija's advice stays grounded: don't be afraid to fail, because even a losing test means you haven't spent all that money on dev for something that doesn't work.

Maija Frankovich's experimentation program at R. M. Williams didn't start with a revenue target or a conversion goal. It started with something harder — changing how a 90-year-old brand makes decisions.

Four years in, that culture shift has taken hold. The team now tests everything from homepage banners to full product page redesigns, monitoring the complete funnel and learning as much from the experiments that don't win as the ones that do. The boot discovery project proved that bringing customers along the journey — rather than surprising them with change — drives both engagement and completed orders. And when a homepage test showed more engagement but less conversion, that wasn't a failure. It was exactly the kind of insight that stops the business investing dev resources in the wrong direction.

Now, with Agent Platform helping generate test ideas and summarise results, and conversational AI-powered search on the horizon, R.M. Williams is pushing the program into its next phase. But the foundation Maija built hasn't changed: use data to prove or disprove what the business believes, and let the customer — not the highest-paid person's opinion — have the final word.