Stichd Stichd, part of the Puma brand, is responsible for fan wear. Their football and Formula 1 teams are massively popular, attract a large global audience.

In November 2021, Stichd approached Penfield Digital to help solve a difficulty the company was facing. With the power of Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, Stichd wanted to create the perfect online buying experience for fans.

Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton are gearing up for another race weekend? Then all of their fans should be properly dressed for the occasion! As one of the leading marketing automation agencies in the Netherlands, Penfield Digital was tasked with the implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to further develop strategic solutions for Stichd.

In December 2021, we teamed up with Wolfpack, our Commerce Cloud partner, and started integrating both the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud into the Stichd platforms. This task included the setup and integration of a multi-cloud solution incorporating Salesforce Commerce, Service, and Marketing Cloud.

Stichd always used a simple IT landscape and basic CRM system to manage email campaigns. This no longer sufficed. It prevented the company from getting the accurate customer data it needed to increase personalisation. Stichd also had trouble tracking its commercial growth. All in all, Stichd’s limited digital toolkit was stunting the scalability, data integration, and functionality of the company’s campaigns.

The optimization process came with its own unique set of technical challenges. Let’s take a quick look at the major ones.

1. Integrating Salesforce Marketing Cloud and creating a scalable technology stack to serve multiple webshops. Prime examples are Fuel For Fans and the incredibly popular Mercedes-AMG Petronas and Manchester City online shops.
2. Maintaining the Stichd platform by being able to easily roll out new online shops despite tight schedules.
3. Integrating Stichd’s marketing platform with its commerce platform.

Stichd had two important overarching marketing goals: to create a more personalized user experience and to increase conversion rates.

Based on the challenges faced by Stichd and its established objectives, Penfield Digital created solutions that not only made marketing and personalized commerce simpler for the company but also allowed the company to track its progress much better. As a part of the Marketing Cloud setup, we integrated the different brands that Stichd manages into one account. To achieve this, we used a structure with different business units (BU’s). In order to ensure a flawless transactional and commercial fan experience, it was critical to ensure data integrity among the different BU’s.

Given that there is no direct connector between Salesforce Commerce and Marketing Cloud, Penfield Digital implemented a custom solution to connect the two systems. Once Service Cloud became available, we replaced the custom solution with an out-of-the-box connector (Marketing Cloud Connect). Penfield Digital also supported Stichd by setting up multiple transactional workflows and notifications in the form of triggered emails for each of its brands.

We used several technologies and methods to solve the technical challenges that Stichd faced. A quick overview:

1. We created one scalable technology stack serving multiple online stores for different fan groups (Fuel For Fans, Mercedes-AMG Petronas and Manchester City). This improvement allowed Stichd to quickly scale up its efforts by creating new online stores.
2. The aforementioned technology also allowed Stichd to design and build functionality with one pilot webshop, optimize it, and then roll out the format to other online shops. This saves the company a lot of time and money.
3. We created a uniform data model for all online stores. How? By using out-of-box integration between Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Commerce Cloud. This made it easy to leverage all the data in Service and Marketing Cloud – including orders, products, customers, webshop accounts, and more.
4. The Marketing Cloud can leverage the data in Service Cloud. Marketing Cloud is triggered with each entry in the custom object. By using payloads in JSON format, Stichd can easily provide complex payloads (such as orders with order lines and promotional discounts). Subsequently, Marketing Cloud can process this data via the efficient Guided Template Language (GTL).

The project yielded impressive results, allowing Stichd to step up marketing efforts and improve customer personalization.

• Stichd can onboard new online stores more quickly and easily thanks to the shared data model, new technology stack, and templates we created and used.
• Fewer abandoned shopping carts (ASC), higher overall revenue and an increased conversion rate (14.68% for the first release) boost the company’s earnings.