The next generation
composable commerce for
Craft Sportswear

Craft Sportswear, owned by New Wave Group, is one of our classic Swedish clothing brands. Since 1973, they have been developing high-tech training clothing for all imaginable sports.

Challange

From selling through retailers, Craft has since had a few years ago also invested in an own webshop. They were early on with choosing a headless architecture with static page generation to take advantage of the large performance lift and with it a better user experience which such a solution gives.

Over the years, a couple of challenges had crystallized with the webshop that needed fixing to increase the efficiency.

A challenge with the first generation headless solutions is that it often takes a long time to generate a new version of the website when done an update. Deployment times of 15 minutes are not unusually. With Craft's large product range that demands frequent updates became the constant construction one bottleneck. That bottleneck needed to be addressed.

A similar challenge that Craft had was the way that the product catalog was constructed. At first glance clothes can feel like quite simple products. MAN choose color and size and add to cart. But each product actually consists of several unique variants. A product available in sixteen colors and seven different sizes are actually 112 different products.

To be able to display product facts for each product i the web shop meant that the web editors had to insert the same or similar product data over and over, which became repetitive and ineffective.

Our role

When Craft came to us they needed help replacing them platforms that caused the inefficiency, but without taking removed the parts and services of the solution that actually worked in a good way. Craft themselves had developed a new design and technical requirements list. Our role was partly to complement ours expertise and partly to realize the new website.

Solution

We based the new solution on three main platforms.

- Centers to manage the e-commerce functionality
- Storyblok to take care of content and product enrichment and
- Depict to streamline product management, search engine and upselling.

From weeks to days

With our implementation of Depict, Craft can now spend time to more valuable tasks such as creating campaigns and landing pages, rather than administering them all product variants. A popularization work as in every case collection releases previously took weeks of work time are now done automated.

With Depict's tagging system as the engine, Craft can show off smartly configured related products on product pages and in checkouts. Depict is also used as a search engine on the site with smartly tailored search suggestions based on purchase data. Based on your visitor profile and your behavior on the site can both search results and recommendations tailored to what you are looking for.

We were inspired to streamline product enrichment of the way Depict handles product data. Take running shoes as an example. Shoes within the same category may have some common characteristics such as technology and materials. Previous the editor therefore needed to go into each product variant and enter the same material text over and over again. We took developed a feature in Storyblok that makes it possible for the editor to create the text once and via an internal tagging system, the same text is added to all the products that matches the tagging.

From sleepless to seamless launch

When you launch something as business-critical as e-commerce, you want as smooth a transition as possible. With the help of the technical architecture we set up, we were able to connect other platforms that Craft continued to use, such as Ingrid for managing delivery opportunities.

50% lower cost

By choosing cost-effective platforms and hosting options, we were able to reduce the cost of Craft by 50% compared to the previous solution, without compromising on performance or user experience, quite the opposite.