When I joined the Browse & Delight team, there was a strategic push to increase sales of DTC exclusive products. I was tasked with identifying opportunities to optimize the customer journey for this product range.

Based on available research insights, there were three main areas to optimize for.

Before starting the project, the “exclusive” terminology was being used loosely across the website. Several markets were inconsistently referring to products as exclusive. This led to confusion internally, consequently making it difficult for users to understand what adidas exclusivity really meant.

My first step was aligning on clear definitions for the different types of exclusivity in our product offering. I worked with relevant stakeholders to establish a shared language and create a structure clearly outlining what exclusive meant in adidas. The outline also helped in clarifying the scope of the project, and understanding how it fit in the larger picture of the business strategy.

The next step was to gather insights into how customers were interacting with our exclusive products. Where did their journey typically start? What were their thoughts as they progressed through the journey? Which touchpoints had the most potential? I conducted a workshop to create an end to end customer journey map to answer some of these questions.

From the above exercise, we discovered several foundational issues to be addressed in order to enable us in providing the best experience to users interested in exclusive products. We also found some actionable opportunity areas to dive into, to start improving the experience.

Following the customer journey map, I created opportunity trees for each stage of the journey. The goal of this exercise was to find mid-term opportunities and low-hanging fruit; using our existing UI component capabilities to address some of the uncovered UX opportunities.

I created mock-ups for the short-term opportunities and they were handed off to select markets, to be piloted and validated. If proven to be successful, other markets would follow suit with implementation.

In addition, I facilitated a brainstorm with the relevant designers and developers to explore larger concepts to address some of the opportunities we came up with in the customer journey map phase. We generated a list of ideas and experimentation lines to help with their validation.

The recommendations from my discovery work for exclusives were widely distributed across the company (as far as a presentation to the CEO). The main area where we had success in improving the experience was in the clarification and education around exclusive products. We ran A/B experiments in placements identified in the customer journey map, and noticed a consistent uplift in our commercial KPIs.

Another area of observable improvement was in elevating the presentation of exclusive products. By using more dynamic content such as a 360 turn-able video on the product page, we observed an increase in commercial KPIs (add to bag) for tested products. We learned that implementing this feature for all Tier 1 footwear products for example, could potentially lead to an annual net sales impact of 3.24M globally.