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Consumer celebrates finding a New Era hat that he loves

Customer Stories

New Era: Restyling digital commerce for customers of all ages

Explore New Era’s journey with SAP

To realize its vision as an iconic lifestyle brand, New Era wanted to deliver richer, more personalized experiences that perfectly fit the expectations of its business and consumer audiences. The company is bringing this strategy to life with new levels of agility and flexibility by migrating to the SAP Commerce Cloud solution.

2

major Web site launches.

Reduced

time IT spends managing the digital infrastructure.

With SAP Commerce Cloud, we have robust e-commerce capabilities and the flexibility to introduce new features really quickly, all of which help us keep ahead of customer trends.

Bibin Mohan
Senior Solution Architect
New Era Cap Company Inc.

The Challenge

Serving customers around the globe

With customers across the globe, New Era Cap Company Inc. (New Era) holds more than 500 official product licenses and maintains an enormous stock inventory. To streamline business-to-business (B2B) transactions and provide new services to consumers, New Era modernized its B2B e-commerce Web site and launched a new business-to-consumer (B2C) offering with a commerce solution from SAP four years ago.

 

Seeing rapid changes in B2B and B2C e-commerce, including multichannel and omnichannel retail, social commerce, and personalization, New Era decided it was time to switch gears and migrate to the SAP Commerce Cloud solution, a public cloud offering on Microsoft Azure.

 

The company sought to establish one global e-commerce platform in the cloud to support B2B and B2C transactions, facilitating a consistent view of customers across all channels. But, more importantly, it wanted to deliver a richer, more personalized experience and release new features and tools to customers in shorter cycles.

The Solution

Getting ahead with speed and agility to respond to market dynamics

Having worked with partner EPAM Systems Inc. in the past, New Era once again teamed up with the strategic consulting and software engineering firm. Together with SAP Services and Support offerings, the pair set about reshaping New Era's digital commerce landscape for the future, migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud. This approach included a native integration with SAP Customer Experience solutions, which reduced the implementation effort through existing connectors and built-in integration flows.

 

Offering a single commerce solution for B2B, B2C, and B2B2C use cases, SAP Commerce Cloud gives New Era the ability to quickly respond to changing market requirements without reconfiguring its back-end infrastructure. A cloud portal allows operational tasks to be managed through self-service tools, and Kubernetes is used for automating application deployment. This architecture empowers the lifestyle brand to build and deploy applications quickly to enrich the buying experience and delight more customers in-line with their growing expectations.

 

With its roots in engineering excellence, EPAM’s multidisciplinary global teams took charge of the 21-week global rollout, designing the architecture and running the project with different streams of work globally and locally. New Era first rolled out its B2C Web site in the United States, followed by Mexico and Australia. Then its B2B site went live in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada – with global rollout dates based on the business process requirements of local countries.

The Result

Delighting customers worldwide with a fast deployment across regions

New Era can now operate with agility and flexibility and provide an e-commerce experience that lives up to ever-growing customer expectations. Leveraging multilanguage, multicurrency, and multisite capabilities, the brand can ensure its caps are the perfect fit for customers across the world.

 

Engaging with its B2B and B2C customers through the single solution enables New Era to update its storefront as and when required. At the same time, changes to the core commerce environment can be made without impacting the storefront. These improvements allow the company to change customer touch points and interactions more quickly and easily to deliver highly engaging customer experiences. 

 

The company has already successfully delivered two major Web site launches, deploying its first two releases in the new environment in under an hour. More significantly, the business did not experience global disruption.

 

With the new implementation, New Era has reduced its global IT footprint and the time IT spends managing the digital infrastructure, freeing up more time to focus on core business activities. New Era has also integrated its Cap-builder tool with SAP Commerce Cloud, further enhancing the customer experience. This enables businesses or individuals to directly order a wide variety of its hats and caps customized with a specific brand or the customer’s preferred design.

Future Plans

Staying in style with more meaningful engagement

With the ability to address multiple business models with a single solution, New Era can now engage with its customers in B2B, B2C, B2B2C, or direct-to-consumer business models with SAP Commerce Cloud.

 

Understanding that its wholesale buyers now expect a B2C-like experience, the iconic brand is also working toward delivering a more personalized service and fashioning a process for a frictionless e-commerce experience for them.

SAP helps New Era run better

Key business outcomes and benefits

  • Up-to-date e-commerce Web presence, reflecting New Era as a lifestyle brand
  • Simplified IT footprint and reduced time spent managing the IT infrastructure 
  • Streamlined operations and Web site release process with access to new self-service tools
  • Integrated third-party services and an innovative Cap-builder tool that delights customers with greater convenience

Featured solutions and services

  • SAP Commerce Cloud facilitates a global B2B and B2C e-commerce experience that responds quickly to changing market requirements.

About New Era Cap Company

Founded in 1920, New Era Cap Company Inc. is more than a leading retailer of athletic headwear and sports accessories. While its history is rooted in sports heritage as the exclusive supplier of on-field caps for Major League Baseball, the brand has evolved to have serious clout beyond the baseball cap industry.

Industry Region Featured partner
Consumer products North America EPAM
Featured partner

Earning the SAP Recognized Expertise designation in SAP Commerce Cloud, EPAM is a trusted SAP partner and a leading provider of e-commerce software implementation expertise. Its dedicated team collaborates with customers to deliver next-generation solutions that turn complex business challenges into real business outcomes.

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