FILA transforms into an experience-driven retailer

FILA is a leading sport and leisure footwear and apparel brand that is distributed worldwide. Established over a century ago by the Fila brothers in Italy and known for developing the most innovative ways to celebrate life in motion, the company’s high-design and stylish products are worn by professional athletes and celebrities around the world.

While the brand inspires loyalty, its digital experience did not deliver the same impact as retailers. The company had focused on the wholesale selling of its shoes and apparel to retailers while treating ecommerce as an afterthought. A new President in North America decided to make online a greater priority when the global pandemic shutdown retailers around the world and cancelled events Fila sponsored. As traditional sales were impacted, the need for a digital experience became more obvious.

A new focus on digital

FILA’s previous digital strategy created visibility only at certain points of the year and lacked a consistent connection with consumers. Selling directly to customers would help fill the marketing gaps, but the existing site did not truly capture the FILA look and feel, and its analytics were not optimized to drive sales.

FILA needed a clear view of what its customers were doing online and to better understand how to optimize consumer engagement. The brand engaged Capgemini and the Digital Customer Experience (DCX) digital marketing team to perform an in-depth analysis of the ecommerce ecosystem, create a set of data, tagging, and reporting recommendations, and leverage this information to better inform the business. Capgemini DCX augmented the site’s brand voice to align with its marketing materials and enforce real-time optimizations. The efforts led to a triple-digit percent increase in the year-over-year conversion rate.

Creating the unified design system

With a more data-driven approach, FILA could unlock the potential of its existing customer experience technology stack. Before the pandemic, FILA.com was not seen as a revenue driver and received little investment. Content, personalization, and merchandising that should be handled by Salesforce Commerce Cloud were overridden by other less-appropriate legacy systems. This limited the online tools available and led to a less customer-focused experience.

Based on behavioral data analysis, FILA knew how to deliver the right content at the right time to drive sales, but its legacy technology restricted its ability. In response, FILA and Capgemini detached its old systems from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and began leveraging the platform for its flexibility and scalability. FILA worked with Capgemini to introduce a new, unified content system to elevate and personalize engagement throughout the customer journey.

Part of this improvement path involved a progressive design-optimization program. Capgemini DCX design experts engaged on a rolling sprint basis, identifying key pages and prioritizing the design. FILA was then able to launch bold, high-performance pages in short three-week sprints instead of waiting months for a total site redesign.

Generating an online buzz

The focus on ecommerce has already shown returns. Sales have increased substantially over five months when compared to 2019. In May 2020, FILA.com set a new sales record for the channel, even with advertising and event sponsorships on hold. Additionally, before the pandemic upended plans, FILA had scheduled a launch in collaboration with the Christopher Wallace Estate in honor of the Notorious B.I.G. It was to hit stores in May but, with many retailers closed, the launch strategy changed. Fila.com took the bulk of inventory produced and launched early, on May 19th. Through close partnerships with the logistics and sales teams, FILA.com was able to do a second drop of the shoe days later, coinciding with the Notorious B.I.G.’s May 21st birthday. With the new website design in place, the result was a sell out in less than 24 hours.

FILA’s dynamic customer experience ecosystem also includes robust cloud-integration investments that enhance data flows between systems to allow a 360-degree view of its customers. Leveraging MuleSoft, Capgemini helped FILA build a high-level, API-based integration architecture to access customer and order data more accurately and efficiently. Now, sales and customer-service representatives can track the order and access customer profiles to ensure a seamless transaction and customer experience. The API-enabled integration architecture not only accelerates customer-issue resolutions for orders and shipments but also reduces fraud by providing faster, more efficient, and up-to-date data access for customer-service representatives.

Developed using best practices and brand consistency, the North American site will be used as the blueprint for FILA’s global digital presence. Standardizing its digital channels will create a unified design and shopping experience no matter how or where a consumer interacts with FILA, and it will reuse assets to streamline marketing efforts and reduce site-maintenance costs.

With Capgemini’s support, FILA created a robust, innovative digital-shopping experience that achieved record-breaking sales at the height of a global pandemic, while continuing to partner with wholesalers and retailers.

Technology solutions

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Salesforce Service Cloud
• MuleSoft