Personalized eCommerce for your Fan Base
The Story
Background
Varsity Fashion, a division of Varsity Brands, Inc. is the leading provider of apparel and accessories to cheer and dance teams across North America. They design, manufacture, and sell custom uniforms for many competitive teams.
Challenge
Varsity recognized an opportunity to capture new market share in the apparel space. Their goal was to design and sell custom-designed apparel for fans to support the highly competitive cheer teams, and also extend this Fanwear apparel to other sports and spirit groups. Trifecta’s challenge was to develop online eCommerce micro-sites that could be easily configured and branded by their customer teams and extended through social channels.
Varsity needed an efficient, reliable and automated interface suitable for sales and business users, in addition to IT staff.
Our Work
Strategy
Trifecta partnered with Varsity to develop a comprehensive solution integrated with Varsity’s existing order management system and master product catalog. This allowed the eCommerce sites access to key product data, such as item SKUs, size charts, color lists, price lists, and inventory. A custom Java application on Heroku utilized templates and REST API calls to pull site details, merchandise updates, and dynamically create individual eCommerce sites. The use of Heroku provided guaranteed performance and real-time processing, as well as the ability to leverage add-ons for enhanced functionality. Another key aspect was the ability for customers to select customization and personalization options. AS400 integration pulled product details, and Adobe Scene 7 integration provided dynamic personalization. For fast scalability, Trifecta automated the micro-site store creation process for Varsity.
The need for thousands of micro-sites meant scalability was key. Trifecta's solution was designed to grow with Varsity's business.
Mobile-Responsive Application:
Trifecta’s team developed a custom, mobile responsive application that allowed Varsity to design and generate team store sites on-demand and publish them to Heroku in minutes.
The Results
Results:
Varsity’s market reach has been expanded to offer custom fan and team apparel. The solutions gave Varsity a powerful fundraising platform, allowing teams to generate revenue from apparel sales. In four years post deployment, Varsity had exceeded their goal of 1,000 custom eCommerce storefronts by 600 percent.
“This new solution will allow Varsity to reach a new, untapped market in apparel and provide a great tool for our Sales teams at the same time. Overall, Trifecta was an excellent partner for us on this project. As I learned during this project, and since, there are so many opportunities to provide valuable applications for our customers using Salesforce.”