Everyone has experienced the sensation when you listen to that one song or wear the particular outfit which makes you feel all the time. Famous Footwear, the multi-brand shoe retailer, is setting the goal of becoming that brand that makes its customers feel that they can confidently walk around the streets by changing the way it presents its products. is more than just shoes , they’re an entire experience.
Dan Cornwell, Director of eCommerce & Digital Experience at Famous Footwear and Famous Footwear, presented his company’s customer case study in the Sitecore Symposium 2020 breakout session. Dan Cornwell explained how they changed their platform as well as transformed the digital experiences of their customers from one that was functional and transactional to engaging and emotional.
They were assisted by Joe Koletar, Managing Principal at RBA and an Sitecore Platinum Partner. Who has been working closely together with Famous Footwear and its parent company, Caleres, to meet their technological, business and operational objectives to make all people truly feel “famous”.
Here are some highlights from Their “Making e-commerce famous” session.
Famous Footwear is part of the parent company Caleres which is which is a retail conglomerate worth $3 billion that includes several independent shoe retailers as well as Famous Footwear. Each brand has a direct-to-consumer site, which generates a significant portion of the company’s revenue. Caleres also has over 1200 stores that allow customers to shop online and then pick up at the store (BOPIS).
“We have a lot of websites and a lot of needs for various brands to come to life,” Cornwell declared.
The Sitecore implementation included 13 websites which included Famous.com. It required support for nearly 400000 different items that could be purchased and also support an average daily of 1000 purchases per hour. In high-volume times, the cost of purchases rises to 5,000 dollars per hour, or two purchases per second.
The goal of this digital change was modernize an outdated Caleres commerce platform. With the intention to prepare the company to succeed in the coming 10-year period, Koletar explained. The alliance, which consists from Caleres, Sitecore, RBA and Coveo, an enterprise intelligence search engine, came together in a process of transformation that’s being implemented in the past two years.
The Famous.com change includes a brand new eCommerce solution in its foundation however. It has also been in the process of rebranding to improve the user experience on the internet.
Prior to its digital transformation it was the Famous Footwear brand was somewhat indistinguishable. Offering the same type of shoes that customers could purchase elsewhere and interacting mostly at a transactional level, Cornwell explained.
“It’s not just enough to redo your website,” Cornwell stated. “In between this process it is also necessary to consider repositioning your brand. This had a lot of implications for the site as a whole.”
As part of their brand new Web experience have baked in their new brand positioning.
In preparation for the Famous.com launch. The team announced the first of their new websites in October of 2019 in the beginning. With sites with limited functionality and had less traffic. The goal was to prove that the system was able to handle the volume of traffic and perform as it was expected. The company has been adding increasing numbers of websites to its platform, including Famous.com following on the list.
