With almost 300 stores in Europe and 100 stores in the US, Snipes SE (SNIPES) has been an integral part of the urban scene since its first store opened in Essen, Germany, in 1998 as a “store for the real hip-hop clothing”—selling a wide range of internationally renowned sneaker and textile brands revolving around contemporary lifestyle and urban youth culture. Today, in addition to selling brands including adidas, Jordan, Karl Kani, Nike, Puma, Reebok, and Vans, SNIPES is known for its own brand, which boasts headliner brand ambassadors such as DJ Khaled, Meek Mill, and Snoop Dogg. The company opens new stores in Europe and abroad every month and sponsors some of the largest urban events and festivals throughout Europe.
SNIPES’ rapid growth and demanding but loyal global customer base brought with it the usual challenge for a retailer managing both in-store and expanded online commerce: technology that could not keep pace with modern demands for seamless and personalized shopping.
"We were looking for a strong and experienced development partner who is guiding us through this transformation project. Astound has been going the extra mile in supporting us—it feels like a real partnership. We now have laid the technical foundation for our future digital growth."
But not only SNIPES has benefitted from the joint Astound-SNIPES efforts. All banners from the SNIPES Group have been technically consolidated by replacing a fragmented system architecture comprising different legacy platforms that were not integrated. The platforms were also fighting to keep up with the strong traffic growth rates that led to unsatisfying performance and downtimes during peak shopping periods such as Black Friday.
In addition to addressing the group’s platform challenges, SNIPES was looking to grow its customer base and repurchase rates via upgraded customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities and a best-in-class omnichannel experience able to handle more than 2.5 million orders. And because the company’s customers primarily are young digital natives, SNIPES wanted to combine seamless purchasing with compelling social capabilities and an innovative loyalty program.
Digital Innovation
Working with the Digital Snipes Group led by Jeanine Schneider, Astound implemented a reference application for SNIPES—and subsequently for the other brands in the Snipes Group—that would allow the company to roll out multiple brands in multiple countries based on the same core technology with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Astound also supported SNIPES in implementing a native mobile app for social interaction with target populations—one that includes the ability to utilize full ecommerce functionality of Salesforce Commerce Cloud as customers move up the levels of SNIPES’ loyalty program from “CROWD” to “CREW” to “CORE” based on their purchases and social interactions. For customer support, Astound implemented Salesforce Service Cloud, again first for SNIPES and then for the additional Snipes Group brands, making it possible for the organizations to respond to customer needs across any digital channel.
Additional integrations with the Emarsys customer engagement platform and Melissa products for address verification and address autocomplete provided a robust, responsive, and secure ecommerce platform able to support Snipes Groups’ multiple brands well into the future.
Astound will also provide the Snipes Group with ongoing development support for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, and SNIPES’ native app as well as 24/7 monitoring support.
“We worked especially hard to replace four legacy platforms with state-of-the-art technology,” says Lars Feldscher, managing director of Astound Commerce DACH. “We not only replatformed all websites but also built an app even my digital-native kids say is special. This was an enormous project, with four brands, many countries, an innovative loyalty program, the Salesforce commerce and service products, and a very sophisticated native app.”
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