Mizuno USA: Growth through Modernization

Replatforming to BigCommerce enhances customer experience and fuels growth.

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Mizuno’s mission is to contribute to society through the advancement of sporting goods and the promotion of sports. Originally inspired by American baseball culture, the founder began producing baseball gear and athletic wear designed to be performance-driven while also comfortable. Today, Mizuno is a public company known globally as the leader in high-performance athletic apparel and equipment for almost every kind of popular sport.

Opportunity

Mizuno USA wanted to ensure that their digital commerce capability could fully support the rapidly changing needs and expectations of their diverse customer base.

They were committed to keeping pace in providing a world-class shopping experience as their customers’ needs evolve. To fulfils this commitment, it was essential that their commerce technology stack enabled them to adapt and respond swiftly. This required the ability to effortlessly and cost-effectively implement new features, either by utilizing top-tier, pre-integrated apps from a comprehensive marketplace or by utilizing the custom application development capabilities of their trusted agency partner.

Their goal was to accelerate the growth of their online business by leveraging a modern technology platform that would allow them to be much more nimble and exceed their customer’s expectations at every point of engagement.

The Challenge

Mizuno USA's previous technology stack had limited core functionality and a closed architecture that required significant investment when integrating third-party services and adding new features critical to keeping pace with their ever-evolving business needs. Especially those related to delivering a world-class experience to both long-time loyal customers, and customers new to the brand. The absence of an active app marketplace further impacted their ability to quickly and cost-effectively add new capabilities to their site as needed to keep pace with competitors and meet customer expectations. The expense and time associated with continuing to build upon their legacy systems was neither sustainable nor left any room for innovation, which led to unmet customer needs and missed opportunities to grow their online channel.

Mizuno concluded that the only path forward to position their online business for accelerated growth was to move to an industry-leading, modern commerce platform. This platform needed to be designed with MACH principles in mind and committed to a composable commerce framework. Additionally, it should have a track record of stupendous customer service and extremely competitive pricing. BigCommerce was identified as the ideal platform, featuring the best tech architecture and a strategic business and product focus that aligned perfectly with their needs.

The Solution

Mizuno determined the primary key to a successful move to BigCommerce, on an aggressive nine month timeline, was selecting the right agency partner to lead their mission critical effort. They sought a partner with BigCommerce credentials and experience integrating leading third-party technology services and enterprise systems. This partner needed deep development capabilities, a battle-tested delivery methodology, and a thorough understanding of Mizuno's business, existing technologies, and development needs.

Mizuno selected Mira Commerce

By moving to BigCommerce, it allowed Mizuno USA to immediately leverage the platform's flexible architecture, and integrate best-of-breed solutions like Deck Commerce for order management, Bolt for checkout, vPersonalize for custom team uniforms, and OrangeLV for advanced product configurators. This approach facilitated a unified, robust and full-featured platform where they were able to design and deliver a seamless customer experience commensurate with the Mizuno brand while also enabling operational efficiencies so the overall system could be managed using less of their current in-house team’s time.  

By partnering with Mira Commerce, when third-party services couldn't meet Mizuno's unique business requirements, Mira was able to quickly design and develop custom apps and microservices using Amazon Web Services (AWS). These custom apps and microservices provided new site functionality, as well as processes that enabled real-time and near real-time data flows between their legacy backend systems and other core digital commerce systems and third-party services.

Results and Outcomes

Improved Customer Experience

Real-time Product Availability: Moving from scheduled updates to real time product availability improved the accuracy of product listings dramatically, driving a significant reduction in custom order cancellations for high-demand products.

Transactional Efficiency: Streamlining the path-to-purchase process and integrating Bolt Commerce’s one-click checkout, reduced the time for customers to complete their purchase from 3 minutes down to a few seconds.

Future-Readiness

Flexibility: Adopting a composable commerce framework ensures that technology services and custom functionality can be updated and replaced with minimal risk to the overall system.

Innovation: Accessing the continually expanding app marketplace has allowed for quick, low-cost experimentation with adding new features and services that prove to help growth.

Operational Efficiency

Results in Numbers

+%Increased Average Order Value

+%Improved Average Time to Complete Checkout

-%Reduced Time to Deploy Site Content and Marketing Campaigns

-%Reduced Order Cancellations

“The team at Mira has been awesome to work with, specifically, John, Milagros, and Nick. As long time partners, we've worked directly with the Mira team on our D2C ecommerce initiatives and Mira Commerce has provided excellent guidance, advice and counsel as the ecommerce experts. They've stepped in to solve major issues and understand the big picture for Mizuno's strategy. I look forward to a long future of continuing our working relationship.”

Casey Rodriguez

D2C Manager, Mizuno USA

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