Tom Tailor Builds Ecommerce Experience in Just 3 Months That Out Earns Brick-and-Mortar by 10%

Success is never a bad thing. But sometimes it can hide transformational opportunities.

The Southeastern Europe (SEE) branch of German lifestyle fashion brand Tom Tailor has been wildly successful over the years. Serving customers the latest styles at local brick-and-mortar stores, Tom Tailor SEE was so successful the brand didn’t even feel the need to sell its products online.

That changed when the coronavirus pandemic hit. As was the case with many brick-and-mortar retailers, Tom Tailor was suddenly in need of an ecommerce store to serve regional customers.

Unfortunately, the platform Tom Tailor was using to manage its digital presence just wasn’t suited for ecommerce. In fact, Tom Tailor’s employees couldn’t even do basic content updates without help from the implementing agency, let alone managing a multitude of SKUs that each require its own imagery plus product and pricing information. 

After looking at seven different proposals, Tom Tailor chose to work with Slovenian digital agency Vareo to catapult its commerce journey. 

Vareo’s proposal involved a full-scale migration of the SEE site to Progress® Sitefinity®. Sitefinity made managing content seamless, plus the platform’s tight integration with Ucommerce brought in powerful ecommerce capabilities. With this approach, Tom Tailor could manage the entire ecommerce experience from one platform while minimizing IT overhead costs.

“With other ecommerce systems, you always run into the problem of content management,” said Gorazd Planinc, Martech Solution Architect and Owner, Vareo. “You wind up constantly moving between systems to run different parts of the business.” 

“Sitefinity with the Ucommerce integration enabled us to do everything from one place—this is real power when it comes to selling products,” he added.  

Another key advantage of Sitefinity was the ease with which it could connect to other key systems. This was particularly important since there were different systems at both the corporate and regional level that were vital to streamlining and automating commerce processes.

For example, each SEE location uses its own ERP system to store data about products and stock levels. The main German headquarters also has an image CDN, which was accessed by the product information management (PIM) to create product catalogs. Sitefinity enables seamless integration of all these systems to deliver a more engaging, dynamic shopping experience.