Quick take

Once a small store in Toronto, Roots now has more than 270 locations in Canada, the U.S., and Asia, including corporate-owned and partner-operated locations. The company rapidly expanded its brand with the help of flexible digital solutions delivered by Merkle that have allowed the brand to sell and fulfill to a worldwide shopping base, especially during peak volume times.

Challenge

While Roots was gaining traction as a popular brand, it was hindered by an ecommerce platform that couldn’t scale to meet its sales growth or keep up with industry marketing trends. The brand set out to find a new ecommerce partner – one that could provide an end-to-end solution with a scalable, up-to-date platform, consistently offer inventive commerce integrations, and could grow the Roots brand beyond Canadian borders.

Services
Experience & Commerce

Industry
Retail & Consumer Goods

Market
Global

Tech Partners
Salesforce

Approach

A few years after its original engagement with Merkle, Roots faced an early challenge when preparing for the Winter Olympics. As the official outfitter for the U.S., Canada, and Barbados national teams, Roots was expecting record-setting sales for its Olympic apparel lines. This included official team athletic wear, such as sweaters, jackets, and berets. To keep up with demand after widespread U.S. publicity, the agency quickly built and launched a digital store on Salesforce Commerce Cloud that could process a large influx of orders and ramped up support centers to handle customer communications. By the end of the peak sale period, millions of orders were shipped efficiently and accurately, solidifying Merkle’s business with Roots as its digital end-to-end partner.

Since the early years of the partnership, Merkle has worked diligently to keep Roots on an updated platform and continuously deploy innovative omni-channel initiatives, including ship-from-store and buy online, return to store. As Roots’ managed services partner, Merkle delivers new features and functionality to enhance digital performance at an accelerated pace.

For instance, Merkle bolstered support for international operations. In addition to expanding U.S., operations and “find-a-store” features, Merkle built geotargeting into the site. Geotargeting combines with support for eight new currencies. For example, a site visitor in Australia automatically sees prices listed in Australian Dollars.

Results

Always striving to stay at the forefront of marketing trends, Roots has focused on creating customized shopper experiences integrating personalized data into the brand’s email strategy.

Keys to success

• A relationship of continuing collaboration on innovation initiatives focused on data and marketplaces.
• Ability to understand customer demand and launch capabilities to handle scale in a speedy manner.