New Era Cap Company
New Era Cap Company is America's leading manufacturer of baseball caps.
Challenge
To build an e-commerce site from scratch in six weeks.
Benefits
· Four-person development team built a powerful e-commerce site in six weeks.
· ColdFusion is easy to learn. The tag-centric paradigm is very simple.
· Saved lots of time and effort reusing custom tags.
· Increased customer reach. Now consumers can easily find and buy out-of-state team hats.
Project Details
Since 1920, New Era Cap Company—a family-owned, privately held company—has grown to become America's leading manufacturer of baseball caps. Today, the company has 1,300 employees in five locations around the country, making 15 million caps every year.
New Era sells its caps through major retailers such as Champs, The Sports Authority, and Footaction, as well as other retail chains, college bookstores, and school-equipment dealers. The company also has an exclusive license with Major League Baseball as the official supplier of caps to all baseball players in the major and minor leagues, an agreement that gives the company added prestige and visibility.
An E-Commerce Strategy
As demand for its products grew and its styles and models proliferated, New Era began to examine strategies for selling directly to consumers. But what about channel conflict? According to Dan Marmion, CIO, New Era required an e-commerce strategy that wouldn't compete directly with retail channels. "When it came to direct sales, we had two alternatives," he said. "The first was to build our own chain of stores. But that would have required lots of capital and retailing expertise that we didn't have—and it would have been too threatening to our retail partners.
"The other alternative was to build an e-commerce site. This made much more sense to us for several reasons. First, we have 10,000 SKUs. No retailer commits to stocking all of those different caps. Buyers who need fitted caps with sizes at the larger or smaller ends of the spectrum might not be able to find them. Or a Seattle Mariners fan living in Atlanta might not be able to find the product he or she wants. Our site would be able to serve those consumers without encroaching on our retailers."
When it came time to construct its e-commerce site, New Era turned to AppliedTheory, a Macromedia Alliance Partner, to help them with all aspects of the site including development and hosting. "Initially, we partnered with Applied Theory because we needed to upgrade our Internet communications infrastructure," said Marmion. "Their capabilities in that area were excellent, so we asked them if they could help us build the site, too. We're a traditional manufacturing and distribution company—we didn't have a Web staff, so a one-stop shop was appealing to us."
It fell to Darin DeRoberts, project manager from AppliedTheory to help New Era Cap select the right platform for its new e-commerce system. He recommended Macromedia ColdFusion. "We use ColdFusion for virtually all of our client engagements," said DeRoberts, "because it's the fastest, most efficient platform for developing Web applications."
With products that are consistently rated by customers and analysts among the most productive, versatile, and accessible in the industry, Macromedia enables both high profile and up-and-coming companies to create innovative Web solutions. Macromedia's family of application servers and visual tools, combined with its application framework, form a complete software infrastructure for building online applications that help companies reach new customers, improve customer service, and maximize business efficiency.
New Era Cap's implementation featured ColdFusion, Macromedia's application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database. Open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. ColdFusion also provides security on every level, from Web development through deployment.
"ColdFusion tags are very similar in appearance to HTML tags," said DeRoberts, "so development is simple, fast, and reusable."
A Complete e-Commerce Site in Six Weeks
With the opening of baseball season fast approaching, New Era had little time to waste. "We only gave them six weeks to complete the job," Marmion said. "We had our requirements on Feb. 25 and were live on April 4. AppliedTheory did an amazing job—and we were able to offer not just baseball caps, but caps for all major sports."
In that six-week cycle, the team created a complete e-commerce site—display, navigation, shopping cart, and content management. "We gave them the ability to update their product catalog as needed with new teams and new hats," DeRoberts said. "Currently five people use it to update the site, independently and on the fly."
Today, when major sports events take place, New Era sees spikes in traffic and sales. For example, when Jason Giambi of the Oakland Athletics won the American League MVP, New Era offered a special Giambi cap on its site. "We had the official World Series 'Locker Room' cap," Marmion said, "and that brought in strong traffic as well.
"As we build our brand, we anticipate that our Web site will be the equivalent of a good mid-size customer [retail store]. We predict the site will eventually grow to comprise 10-15% of our business."
Site Summary
New Era Cap
8-61 Erie Road
Derby, NY 14047
Macromedia Products:
Macromedia ColdFusion, ColdFusion Studio
Hardware:
Compaq Proliant 1600R, 500 MHz Intel processor
Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP6
Database:
Microsoft SQL Server 7
Development Team:
2 developers, 1 project manager, 1 DBA
Macromedia Alliance Partner:
AppliedTheory
Industry:
Manufacturing
Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.
