New Era sees 60% growth yearly with Optimizely DXP

Founded in 1920, New Era Cap Company is the world's number one headwear maker, producing more than 35 million caps per year. It is 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.

Aside from being known for its sports collaborations, it also works with heroes of urban music scenes across the globe.

New Era Cap has also developed a strong identity on the street and is growing its brand into apparel and across new markets. As an innovative fashion business, New Era Cap customers can take pride in the brand's authentic heritage as well as high-quality and functional designs.

With more than 100 years of history, a New Era cap is a staple accessory for today's youth.

Its business expansion was at the top of New Era Cap's mind when it approached its digital strategy. New Era Cap wanted to increase its market share, attract a wider and more varied customer demographic, and fashion a personalized, interactive online customer journey that increased both front-of-house conversion rates and backend operational efficiency.

New Era Cap was keen to develop a new site for the EMEA region that represented the authenticity and individuality of its brand as the existing site was outdated.

To significantly scale its business, especially its D2C channel, New Era Cap required a site that supported an interactive and rich media brand experience alongside a solid, high-performance ecommerce platform optimized for conversion.

New Era Cap's digital transformation goals include:

• Building a site that represented the authenticity & individuality of the New Era Cap brand as the existing site was outdated and not optimized for conversion.
• Increasing operational efficiency.
• Attracting a wider customer demographic whilst growing its social footprint and engagement.
• Increasing conversion rates.

An extensive discovery phase, which included workshops and sessions with all the site stakeholders and audiences, both internal and external, was conducted. 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 Cap as a market leader.

With all the information gathered, New Era Cap identified the key requirements needed for its website overhaul, including:

• A fully responsive website
• User journeys that feature-rich product filtering and searching
• Ability to easily manage 11k+ product SKUs
• A global site that would serve over 40 European markets in five languages using two currencies

Tapping into Optimizely's 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 for different markets with delivery exclusion rules
• Managing product catalog and translation partner integration using Optimizely projects and Optimizely service API

Optimizely partner UNRVLD, formerly Made to Engage, joined forces with New Era Cap for a holistic customer-focused campaign, maximizing Optimizely's full DXP suite to increase conversion rates and customer engagement.

To deliver a high-performance and secure website for its users, New Era Cap leveraged Optimizely Cloud Service Hosting.

New Era Cap's customer-centric, end-to-end ecommerce journey is built on Customised Commerce, with multiple payment gateways including Opayo, PayPal, and Klarna. For seamless order placements and internal workflow, New Era Cap's SAP ERP system is also fully integrated using Optimizely's service API feature.

For improved user experience, UNRVLD rebuilt major UI components of New Era Cap's EMEA website including a brand-new checkout process.

For their Product Listing Pages, UNRVLD rearchitected New Era Cap's site search and search listings algorithm using 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 Cap's personalization efforts are supported by an array of Optimizely solutions to deliver the best experience for individual site visitors. Product Recommendations is utilized on key pages including the homepage, listing, and product pages.

New Era Cap also leverages Optimizely's Content Management System to deliver personalized content across five languages and 43 markets across EMEA. UNRVLD refined the language translation technology for seamless translations and created localized market workflows.

Personalization efforts are further supplemented by UNRVLD's implementation of Optimizely's Data Platform, allowing the New Era Cap team to capture unified profiles of customers and segment these profiles according to behavior and preferences.

Ensuring a customer-first approach by testing was essential for rapid growth. Using Optimizely's experimentation capabilities, New Era Cap leverages data to optimize conversions on add-to-cart call-to-action, the sorting order of product listing page, size guide page retention, and exclusivity messaging at its checkout page.

For New Era Cap to maximize Optimizely's solution suite, UNRVLD also upgraded existing solutions and developed flexible, configurable experimentation systems that can be replicated at ease for various tests.

New Era Cap substantially increased operational efficiency since the launch of its new website. Key tasks that were previously manual are now being automated. The preparation and execution of adding new product lines to the website was once a full-time job for a member of the New Era Cap staff; now this has been reduced, enabling them to focus on other high-value tasks to the benefit of the company.

The New Era team is also empowered to edit and manage content with more confidence than ever thanks to the intuitive user interface of Optimizely’s solution.

With an engaging and customer-centric approach, New Era Cap increased its social footprint and email database. The New Era Cap Fan Club, a customer-centric email newsletter, averages 3,000 new registrants every week.

By experimenting at speed and scale, New Era Cap has experienced year-on-year growth of more than 60%, with Black Friday sales rising by 123% in 2021 compared to 2020.

New Era Cap’s new site UX is also helping site visitors find the right products swiftly, resulting in a 51% increase in product views and 70% increase in add-to-cart.

Since personalization is playing a more important role in New Era Cap’s new digital direction, the team is building a constantly evolving intricate view of customer behavior and preferences, laying the foundation for effective personalization of web and email content. This has resulted in a 9% increase in returning customers.

This award is presented to the Optimizely customer that has solved a complex business challenge or met a market demand in a new and exciting way. Leveraging innovative strategies, this company has created customer-centric, behavior-driven experiences, anticipated customer needs, and has created an overall exceptional website experience.