Over the past decades, activewear has become increasingly popular for everyone. Whether people are running a race, lounging around their house or meeting a friend for lunch, activewear is viewed as a sensible and comfortable fashion statement today.

In Hong Kong and mainland China, Swire Resources is one of the biggest names in activewear and sporting gear, adapting to changing consumer preferences and market trends to offer the best brands to consumers. The company represents a range of top international brands in the region, including Arena, Speedo, Columbia, Chevignon, Teva, Havaianas, Crocs, Cath Kidston and UGG. The company also operates close to 200 retail shops in Hong Kong, primarily through its performance-focused Marathon Sports and GigaSports brands and its fashion-focused Catalog brand.

“When I joined the company, we were only operating off-line, either by running our retail shops or operating as a distributor,” says Kelvin So, General Manager of IT at Swire Resources. “We realised that digital channels were becoming increasingly important. We needed to establish our own e-commerce operations if we wanted to stay ahead of the competition.”

After initially relying on partners to set up and maintain its e-commerce sites, Swire Resources decided to bring operations in-house to increase control over content and minimise operating costs. Using Magento Open Source, Swire Resources created e-commerce sites for Marathon Sports, Catalog and many of its other brands. But over time, the company recognised the need for a more responsive, integrated enterprise solution and decided to upgrade to Adobe Commerce to take advantage of its more advanced functionality.

“Adobe Commerce is the scalable enterprise commerce solution that we needed to grow our digital channels,” says So. “We can guide shoppers to the products they’re looking for and fulfill orders with ease, delivering much stronger customer experience and service online.”

Consolidating sites onto a single platform

With help from its partner CLEARgo, Swire Resources brought Marathon Sports and Catalog onto a single Adobe Commerce instance. Combining these sites has two major benefits for customers: shared shopping baskets and shared customer profiles.

The previous Marathon Sports and Catalog websites operated on separate instances of Magento Open Source. A customer might go to the Catalog site searching for particular trainers, not realising that they are considered high-end running shoes carried by Marathon Sports. When the customer couldn’t find the shoes from Catalog, they might start looking at other online retailers.

With both e-commerce sites on the same Adobe Commerce instance, Swire Resources can increase cross-brand awareness and guide shoppers to the correct site. The integrated search functionality enables someone searching for an item on the Marathon Sports site to also see relevant products available on the Catalog site and vice versa.

Shoppers can also include purchases from both Marathon Sports and Catalog in the same shopping basket. If they want to make a purchase online and pick it up in the shop, they can select either a Catalog or Marathon Sports location and pick up items from either brand. This integration and connectivity led to greater sales for both brands. While Marathon Sports has higher in-store sales than Catalog, it previously had much lower online sales. Since migrating to Adobe Commerce, online sales for Marathon Sports have caught up to Catalog.

Swire Resources already had an integrated loyalty programme and mobile app for the brands, but it only applied to off-line purchases. By integrating Adobe Commerce with its CRM, the loyalty programme now encompasses both online and off-line sales for Marathon Sports and Catalog. Now, loyalty members can accrue points faster and use points for coupon redemptions and discounts on either brand, whether they are shopping in shops or from the comfort of their homes.

This new, unified loyalty programme also provides Swire Resources with more visibility into customers: what products they like to buy, how frequently they make purchases and how much they spend. The company has the potential to better market products to customers, delivering more relevant emails and promotion offers.

“In the nine months after migrating Marathon Sports and Catalog to Adobe Commerce, online sales have been growing substantially and we saw a 50% growth in loyalty membership,” says So. “Part of the growth can be attributed to our new site with better UX/UI design, but it’s also a result of increased cross-selling, smoother checkout and faster website response from Adobe Commerce.”

Faster delivery through smoother operations

Through integrations and new functionality, Adobe Commerce makes managing e-commerce operations much easier for Swire Resources. While developers can create extensions to expand the functionality of Magento Open Source, Swire Resources lacked the development resources it needed to create truly automated, integrated data flows between systems. For example, staff spent a great deal of time and effort manually downloading and uploading logistics information between the e-commerce platform and the SAP Retail system.

With Adobe Commerce, information flows seamlessly between SAP Retail, the CRM and other critical systems. Product fulfillment teams get orders faster, which leads to faster time to deliver for customers.

Swire Resources now operates Adobe Commerce on scalable infrastructure supported by AWS. “Adobe Commerce accelerates response times for our e-commerce sites, connecting customers with the products that they want even faster,” says So. “We hope to move more of the brands that we support to Adobe Commerce to enhance digital experiences for our customers.”

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