Step into Success: New Balance Brazil Doubles Conversion with VTEX Migration

The Dass Group is a company that has over 40 years of experience in the sports market and offers an integrated management and sourcing operation for brands. Its portfolio includes New Balance, Fila, Umbro, and Osklen.

Challenge

New Balance is a global brand that caters to a broad audience—from young sneakerheads to athletes and even people who are merely looking for comfortable shoes. Regardless of the audience, the brand’s digital strategy goal is to offer the best shopping experience to all consumers.

With the old ecommerce platform, New Balance Brazil could not offer innovative or differentiated experiences beyond the basic sales journey, which incurred high development costs and resource allocation to implement essential features required for the complete functioning of an ecommerce site.

The New Balance team also had to develop several components from scratch. For instance, implementing the single-page checkout alone took four months. On VTEX, this component is already native, saving time and resources. Additionally, there was a need for support for regional features like ID and postal code validation and integrations with anti-fraud mechanisms.

In the long term, maintaining the old platform would be more costly and require a technologically mature team dedicated exclusively to the platform.

“We needed to allocate more development hours and hire additional developers for the operation, for example. Ultimately, the final cost was lower with the implementation and integration of VTEX’s native components, which are focused on improving the shopping experience.”

Victor Hugo Pires da Silva, digital director at the Dass Group

Solution

VTEX attracted New Balance’s attention because its composable and complete platform offers plug-and-play functionalities and its extensive partner ecosystem, allowing seamless integrations with native solutions.

One of New Balance’s pain points was integrating the price catalog into the platform and automating the XML catalog. Previously, the brand lacked a structure for manually updating prices by SKU and relied on the services of an IT team to generate and upload files for each product. With integrations via APIs, the performance team could directly adjust prices on the platform, program promotions, and implement discount coupons, saving time and resources for the IT team.

“At VTEX, we can devote much more time to frontend development and thus invest and focus on the customer experience with the customizations available.”

Victor Hugo Pires da Silva, digital director at the Dass Group

In addition, VTEX’s more intuitive panel empowered non-technical teams to customize, test, and explore functionalities within the site’s front end. For instance, they streamlined the integration of the shipping simulator and color variation per product in the PDPs using the platform’s native features.

Another benefit of the migration was the extraction and management of customer data. With all purchasing information, behavior, and data centralized, extracting and filtering as needed for the brand’.

Results

The migration to the VTEX platform was completed in record time with minimal complexity and facilitated quick results for New Balance’s Brazilian ecommerce operation. The project’s implementation partner was Maeztra.

One month after the migration, the brand recorded twice as many hits on its product pages doubled conversions, and increased revenue.

“We’re able to work on new projects and plan for the future because now we can recover the time spent on projects that should already be automated.”

Krishna Cavalcante, Omnichannel Manager at the Dass Group

*DISCLAIMER: All information and figures mentioned in the text above have been supplied and approved by the Dass Group and New Balance (VTEX's customer).