adidas

adidas partnered with Reaktor to build a next level ecommerce offering, placing technical excellence and a superior customer experience in online retail at the centre of their business strategy.

Vertically sliced, rebuilt from the ground up, and iteratively redesigned, adidas.com is setting new standards in digital shopping.

The digital store is Adidas's fastest-growing sales channel, generating double-digit growth rates annually.

In early 2017, Adidas set an ambitious goal to quadruple their online sales from €1 billion to €4 billion by 2020. To do this, the company made a pivotal strategic decision to partner with Reaktor to rebuild their digital presence, drive direct relationships with their customers, and elevate the adidas brand through exceptional online experiences.

The results of our work speak for themselves. Last year, the €4-billion goal was not only reached but surpassed. And, CEO Kasper Rorsted refers to ecommerce as the future of the company.

Our strategic partnership empowers adidas to deliver on their mission like never before by paving the way for a new, agile working method – one that champions swift iteration, a focus on personalization, and the emergence of a performance-led methodology.

The adidas experience is a combination of varying rich media, optimized page composition with product at the center, pragmatic functionality, and benchmarkable efficiency.

Design decisions are research-driven and backed up by meticulous iteration and testing. The experience can always be improved, and at a global scale, even a small tweak ends up creating a big impact.

Improving discoverability and storytelling, cross-selling relevant items, and decreasing the amount of returns are some of the challenges we work on. The end goal is to always serve better: when engaging the customer directly, it is crucial to remember they are king.

The full impact of design decisions are seen in the long-term, but big leaps can also be taken quickly. adidas is constantly developing their ability and systemic design tools to boost creative experimentation as part of any process.

For an online store, speed directly translates to revenue in the form of conversion and reduced bounce rates.

By shaving 3.5 seconds off adidas’s product pages load time, site speed was increased by 60%. Constant optimization for performance takes commitment to continuous iteration, trimming off load times from multiple moving parts of the site, rigorous testing, and a headless ecommerce system.

Speed matters later on in the customer journey as well. At the checkout phase, a 69% improvement in page response time sparked a major uptick in conversion. Removing obstacles, constantly reviewing the cart-to-order ratio, and optimizing the checkout flow for effortlessness are at the center of the checkout experience.

To achieve the ambitious goals for 2020 and integrate into existing third-party services, such as SalesForce, a new backend solution was built with Node.js and TypeScript.

With the new backend solution, the existing ecommerce services could be kept in place, while simultaneously taking a performance leap in page load times and handling traffic peaks with confidence.

The chosen stack of new technologies serves to increase speed to market – and, no less importantly, developer satisfaction. With the new tech stack, onboarding new developers as demand fluctuates is painless, and new features are fast and easy to develop.

When a Beyonce, Bad Bunny or Pharrell collaboration drops, sneaker heads and fashionistas all over the world refresh their browser.

For each hotly-anticipated collection launch, a dynamic tool helps verify the authenticity of the shopper to keep the army of bots at bay and the hype ranges exclusive to real fans.

Online Waiting Rooms funnel traffic and balance the demand to make sure the store stays up and running. In late 2018, a record number of a wildly popular adidas shoe line were sold in one drop – and the site handled all orders with ease.

• Software architecture and design
• Backend development of a scalable middleware solution
• Frontend development of a responsive webapp
• Product design
• Design sprints
• Proof of concepts
• High fidelity prototyping
• 24/7 support & maintenance