Step into a crosswalk in New York City at the wrong time and you might get hit by a taxi. In the city where the speed of business is as perceptible in the air as temperature, humidity and the mouth-watering smells of classic New York street faire, there was perhaps no better location in the USA to talk about gaining speed in online commerce. This week, commercetools together with our partners Amplience, Mobify and EPAM gathered headless commerce practitioners, analysts and major brands like Under Armor, Tiffany, JCrew and Tom Ford at the fabulous Manhattan Penthouse for our second edition of The Headless Summit. The Headless Summit: London Calling event took place earlier this year.
The Summit featured guest speaker Forrester Senior Analyst Joe Cicman, Under Armor’s Senior Product Manager Patrick Grissinger, and an engaging visual workshop by ImageThink. The one-day event was aimed at defining headless commerce and giving attendees perspectives from key components of the ecosystem including CMS, front-end PWA, and commerce as well as practical approaches to implementation.
In this blog article, get highlights from Patrick Grissinger’s talk, download your complimentary copy of our brand new guide Headless Commerce Playbook for Business Leaders, watch a short video recap of the event, and scroll through photos capturing all the activities of the day. Enjoy!
Tales From the Front Lines
In this Q&A panel led by Patrick Grissinger of Under Armour, Igor Faletski from Mobify, and Michael Jones from Amplience, we got to hear from someone whose organization is right in the midst of a transition to headless. Grissinger sums up the business challenge:
We’re in nearly 30 markets with thousands of stores around the world that includes fitness centers, content, commerce, and retail. How do we make it come together in a cohesive consumer journey? We can imagine it. With headless we hope to make it a reality.
Senior Product Manager, Under Armour
When asked if people understand the need for headless architecture he said, “We all agree that the pain is there and now we need to solve it in a lightweight and lean way.” To neatly summarize, “having a nine month waterfall project to solve these problems is the old way.”
Grissinger said one of the impacts of this move to a new architecture is that all parts of the organization are aligning around go to market – digital products, physical products, IT, commerce, marketing – and it’s exciting to see the business align this way.
Under Armour has been one of the first brands to have a progressive web app from Mobify. Grissinger explained why: “UA’s brand has been in growth mode and so we wanted to address the broadest possible market which is why we decided to do a PWA.” The question then became how do we tune it from and experience and speed perspective to get the most out of it? With Under Armour’s PWA, it was all about iteration. Being able to make changes based on feedback from data allowed the team to continually tune the experience. “We tuned the whole time, for speed, to get performance metrics, for issues around how customers enter the journey.”
The entire consumer journey from the moment they enter is objectively better, it’s faster, and they can move through the journey much quicker and more seamlessly. It’s almost painless to navigate from product pages to categories. We have double digit revenue growth, 3x return rate, 65% less pre-bounce.
In summary, Grissinger said they have lots more people getting to the site, adding more things to their cart and buying more things. As for headless, “The next phase is about scale, can we do this in all 28 markets?”
Visit our website to learn more about headless and make sure you download your complimentary copy of our brand new Headless Commerce Playbook for Business Leaders. If you’d like to speak to someone on our team about headless commerce, contact us here or send an email request to mail@commercetools.com.
Enjoy these highlights from Headless Summit NYC!
