Case Study

Creating an omnichannel commerce experience is a lot like training for a big race: there are core building blocks everyone can work from, but ultimately a certain amount of adaptation and flexibility needs to be in place for the best chance of success. New Balance needed to get the ball rolling on a few key changes, but weren’t in a position to rewrite the whole playbook. To help them usher in a new era of digital shopping, Orium brought in a headless CMS to power content for the web and the app. This allowed personalized content to be delivered with ease, but meant that New Balance could leverage their existing OMS and retail platforms.

Composable architectures offer the greatest flexibility for a future-ready commerce experience, but getting started on a composable framework doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing endeavour. We took an incremental approach to Composable Commerce with New Balance, allowing them to serve key needs in the here and now and to pivot quickly and easily as they implemented new customer experiences. Building a capacity to support more composable components over time, instead of all at once, meant New Balance was able reduce costs and risks associated with updating their ecommerce engine all at once while still setting a foundation for a future-ready approach.

Composable frameworks operate with an API-first approach, which offers many benefits. In the case of New Balance, a composable CMS allowed content to be driven from other systems to any interface— wearable, mobile, kiosk and beyond. Instead of rebuilding the New Balance commerce experience in a native application that supports both Android and iOS, which would’ve been a costly and time-consuming endeavour, we were able to deploy a commerce experience to an existing mobile app quickly by deploying a webview of the site shopping experience.

By leveraging the CMS and exposing an API architecture that would allow us to publish content to multiple "heads" and channels, we were able to speed up deployment time, reduce costs, and incrementally trial experiences that could be improved with real-time customer feedback.

The CMS in this case also injected content into Demandware, which powered the web commerce channel. As part of ensuring future extensibility for when the experience needs to be changed or built upon, a Middleware layer was developed to handle communication between an in-store kiosk, mobile apps, and the website. This also served as integral pipeline of customer data and the starting point of building out a consumer data hub that was then used for segmentation and marketing strategy.