Optimising New Era Cap's E-Commerce Experience
As the Lead Product Designer at UNRVLD (formerly Made to Engage), I collaborated with a multidisciplinary team to enhance New Era Cap's (NEC) e-commerce strategy in the European market from 2021-23. Our goal was to drive better sales and customer engagement through iterative improvements in design, user experience, and content.
Challenge: NEC, the world's largest headwear brand, sought to achieve substantial growth in the European market. The challenges included optimising their e-commerce platform, increasing organic traffic, and creating a personalised customer experience while transitioning from wholesale to a direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel.
Approach:
Continuous Improvement Philosophy: From the outset, we adopted a philosophy of continuous improvement, applying data-driven enhancements to every aspect of the digital experience.
Mobile-First Strategy: Recognising that 70% of web traffic came from mobile devices, we prioritised a mobile-first strategy to ensure effortless conversions across regions.
Email Marketing: We created the New Era Cap Fan Club, resulting in 3,000 new sign-ups per week post-launch. This initiative served as both a customer touchpoint and a source of valuable first-party customer data.
Experimentation: We integrated Optimisely experiments into NEC's 2022 roadmap, enabling rapid and scalable experimentation to continually delight and engage customers.
Data-Driven Insights: We analysed sales data, user behaviour, and site search patterns to better understand the NEC customer. This led to discoveries and an understanding of how the user purchased and browsed and saw products - e.g. NEC's '59Fifty' product was a crown jewel, while the '9Forty' was a cash cow.
Product Listing Page (PLP) Optimisation: We redesigned the PLP to enhance the discoverability of top products, simplified filters, and implemented logic rules to guide users to relevant style or team PLPs.
Checkout Flow Enhancement: Recognising that customers were missing key steps in the checkout flow, we improved the UI of product displays, making descriptions and sizing more accessible.
Data Capture: We implemented pop-ups for data capture, enabling NEC to tailor pop-ups to different visitor types and conversion goals. This approach significantly increased the email subscriber base.
Results:
Revenue Growth: Over a two-year period, NEC achieved a remarkable 107% growth in revenue.
Organic Traffic: The optimisation efforts led to a 60% increase in organic traffic and a substantial 378% increase in EU organic traffic.
Iterative Wins: Continuous improvement yielded both long-term gains, such as 60% YoY revenue growth, and short-term successes, including record-breaking Black Friday sales.
