E-Commerce strategy for etnies, Emerica, éS and thirtytwo

Sole Technology is the Southern California company behind the skate footwear brands etnies, Emerica and éS, and the snowboard boot and outerwear brand thirtytwo. Each brand ran its own online store on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, then called Demandware, with a small E-Commerce team split between the US and Amsterdam and an outside agency handling development.

Sales through the stores were growing, but the E-Commerce team sat apart from the rest of the company. New products could take two weeks to go live online after they were ready, online launches waited on retail and European deliveries, and there was no dedicated plan or budget for bringing in new customers online.

Sole Technology hired DYODE as its E-Commerce consultant and web development partner across the brands. The brief was to look at the whole E-Commerce business, set the technology roadmap and the marketing and operations strategy, and coach the internal team along the way.

We started with an audit, interviewing the people who ran each part of the business. In Amsterdam we sat in on the European team's workflows: seasonal product launches, discounts and markdowns, order processing and customer service, development requests and campaign planning. We also met the development agency, Salesforce and the European warehouse.

We also ran a customer focus-group test of the etnies, Emerica and thirtytwo stores, on desktop and mobile across four browsers, and annotated what shoppers struggled with in navigation, search, product pages and checkout.

Product data lived in several systems and was merged by hand into spreadsheets before every upload. Returns and customer service calls weren't tracked in a tool, so return reasons sat in order notes nobody could report on. The sites were English-only while the brands' biggest competitors ran localized stores.

Development work had been paused until DYODE set priorities, so an early job was a development roadmap that put an estimated cost and expected return against each item on the wish list.

DYODE took on paid search and paid social for etnies, Emerica, éS and thirtytwo, with bi-weekly reviews of Google, Bing and Facebook results for each brand against its budget. We cut Google Shopping bids that had drifted above benchmark, added negative keywords and tested non-brand campaigns in target cities. We also ran Amazon sponsored product campaigns for etnies and Emerica.

We audited etnies.com and emerica.com for search problems, handed the team fix lists for broken links, redirect loops, duplicate titles and hreflang errors, and submitted disavow files for spammy backlinks. On operations, we ran a carrier bid between FedEx and UPS, helped set a minimum advertised price policy for etnies, Emerica and éS, and priced options for translating the sites.

Sole Technology's E-Commerce team got an outside view of the whole business: an audit of how each brand's store actually ran, a development roadmap, and per-brand reporting on every paid channel.

Marketing decisions moved onto a regular bi-weekly cadence, the search problems on etnies.com and emerica.com came with written fixes, and carrier rates and advertised-price rules were reviewed across the brands.