Fashioning personalized experiences for the future of retail.

“We all want to be known and understood — it’s a basic human desire. Personalization helps our consumers feel known. It helps them cut through the clutter and have an efficient and hopefully pleasurable shopping experience where they find what they want.”

Leo Griffin

Vice President and Global Head of Consumer Technology, HanesBrands Inc.

How HanesBrands makes shopping fun with personalized experiences from Adobe Experience Platform

Emmylou Jordan is on a mission to make online shopping fun.

“I want people to have as much fun shopping on our websites as I do building them,” says Jordan, senior manager of global business intelligence and data analytics at HanesBrands Inc. “When I shop, sometimes I end up browsing a site a little longer than necessary just because I enjoy looking at the product and the way it’s presented. And I want my customers to experience the same delight when they shop HanesBrands online.”

Jordan is part of the digital-native audience HanesBrands is targeting as it navigates digital transformation in the retail industry. The multinational clothing company — the parent company to brands including Hanes, Playtex, Maidenform, and others — is approaching the transformation as more than an efficiency exercise. It’s an opportunity for innovation.

That means hiring dynamic, creative people, including talent like Jordan, and empowering them with the best technology available.

According to Leo Griffin, vice president and global head of consumer technology at HanesBrands, it also means appealing to broader demographics through personalized experiences, which has required the company to revolutionize its strategy for gathering and organizing consumer data. With Adobe Experience Platform, including Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, and Adobe Target, HanesBrands has significantly expanded its ability to identify and target high-value customer segments with relevant messages and product recommendations. The HanesBrands team is building on growth achieved with Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager Sites, which has enabled lightning-fast page-load times. As a result, retargeted customers have become three times more likely to make a purchase.

“We all want to be known and understood,” says Griffin. “It’s a basic human desire. Personalization helps our consumers feel known. It helps them cut through the clutter and have an efficient and hopefully pleasurable shopping experience where they find what they want.”

Structuring data for innovation

When Griffin took over consumer technology at HanesBrands, he saw an opportunity to drive conversion rates and revenue through personalization — but he knew his team would need more powerful technology.

“Our personalization tools weren’t linked to our own consumer data, which meant we were essentially building data silos,” says Griffin. “We needed a central data repository with integrated tools that could both feed data in and pull data out so we could create a more consistent, holistic approach to personalization.”

Real-Time CDP offered not only data centralization but also a rich set of features for mining data insights, including segmentation service and customer AI. Jordan was immediately inspired by the possibilities.

“One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Creativity cannot thrive in chaos,’” she says. “I love Real-Time CDP because its data experience model provides rules and strategy so you can create an incredibly creative data layer without making a mess.”

Organizing data in Real-Time CDP also helps the team globalize their strategy because they can see data from different regions at the same time and compare them against each other. With data regulation and use varying across regions, Real-Time CDP also ensures that all data is managed responsibly. The team then uses Adobe Target to apply their insights, test, and optimize to hone their messaging and offers.

“Adobe Target has to be the smartest personalization engine I’ve ever seen with what it’s able to decide and how quickly it’s able to decide it,” says Jordan. “It’s a really great way to do testing. And what is personalization, except tried-and-true testing that leads to understanding the consumer better?”

For Griffin, investing in Real-Time CDP and Adobe Target was also part of a larger strategy to take a full-stack approach to problem-solving and work closely with companies that drive innovation. He had already seen how Adobe Commerce helped HanesBrands meet a surge in demand during the pandemic, and how Experience Manager Sites had boosted page-load times, and he wanted to build on that success.

“We worked with Adobe because of the breadth of the vision and the fact that it was a suite of tools that all work together off the same underlying data model and data sources,” says Griffin. “Adobe’s approach to the consumer data model is powerful, and it gives us headroom for growth for many, many years.”

“Adobe Target has to be the smartest personalization engine I’ve ever seen with what it’s able to decide and how quickly it’s able to decide it. It’s a really great way to do testing. And what is personalization, except tried-and-true testing that leads to understanding the consumer better?”

Emmylou Jordan

Senior Manager of Global Business Intelligence and Data Analytics, HanesBrands Inc.

Overcoming cart-abandonment issues

Jordan’s first experiment with Real-Time CDP and Target was to create audiences for retargeting. HanesBrands was already sending triggered emails to customers who abandoned shopping carts, and Jordan wanted to test which types of customers would yield the best return.

Jordan created medium- and high-propensity segments based on customers’ shopping behavior and sent personalized emails to them. The team adjusted the campaign based on the resulting insights, increasing revenue from the browse series email campaigns by 57%.

“Adobe allows us to get to know our segments better so we can home in and make the data we have work better and harder for us,” says Jordan.

The team has since used these insights to inform personalization for their Australian brands. In one scenario, they used retargeting emails to send customers to a customized landing page that displayed recently viewed items in carefully chosen quantities.

“Think about how cool Target is that you can create a seamless experience keeping the exact modifications that your site normally shows,” says Jordan. “It’s not changing the vibe, it’s not changing the layout, it’s giving you a perfectly branded experience and a curated selection of products for that consumer.”

They also helped the Australian brands customize their abandoned cart emails.

“It filled a gap for the brands that they should have never had,” says Jordan. “Adobe comes in and finds those problems that should have never been there and creates solutions for them that make everyone’s life a lot easier.”

Saying yes to creativity

The abandoned cart email campaigns augmented total revenue for HanesBrand, expanding audience reach by 1,000 customers per week — a number that is projected to continue to increase over time. The impact on revenue was similarly striking, with a 57% increase.

“We have a ton of product offering, and what we learned is that removing clutter leads to significantly more engagement,” says Jordan. “Often, we want to throw our product at the consumer, but that’s not always the answer. The answer is to show them the right product, and that’s what personalization is about.”

The next step for HanesBrands is to expand use cases for Real-Time CDP and Adobe Target. HanesBrands has experienced a 41% lift using behavioral data from Adobe Commerce to personalize the buying experience for their Australasia Bonds brand. HanesBrands also helped pilot Edge Delivery Services, a new set of capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager Sites that uses innovative edge architecture, resulting in a massive boost of site speed for their Maidenform brand, enabling customers to transact faster. Now, HanesBrands is expanding the Edge Services capability to all of its branded websites to enable lightning-fast page load times.

Griffin also believes that one of the best ways to prepare for the unknown future of retail is to encourage new ideas by creating a culture of innovation. HanesBrands has a reputation for empowering its young associates, like Jordan, and including them in decision-making.

“I’m the target demographic, and that’s a nice position to be in because I can say, ‘Hey, I found this experience I really enjoyed, and now I want to re-create it,’” says Jordan. “I’m never told no when I have an idea. It’s always, yes, let’s do that. It might get prioritized on a list of other ideas, but it’s always about innovating.”

For Griffin, technology is a key part of attracting and retaining talent because it makes experiences more effective and fun for them — and for consumers.

“HanesBrands is an exciting place to work if you work in ecommerce, particularly because of the Adobe stacks,” he says. “You get to do great work, and you get to drive these innovative platforms. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”

Read about how HanesBrands and Adobe built one of the fastest ecommerce websites in the world.

Then, learn more about the powerful tools HanesBrands uses to drive its data management and personalization efforts, including Adobe Real-Time CDP and Adobe Target.