Duluth Trading Co. creates lightning-fast digital experiences with headless commerce

A mobile app would seemingly provide everything Duluth Trading was looking for: crisp, streamlined, and convenient. However, Duluth Trading’s leadership wanted to avoid the friction of asking customers to download yet another app, and it didn’t want to add more work for its developers by introducing a separate line of development into the company’s IT ecosystem.

Instead, leaders rebuilt the company’s site using Commerce Cloud’s Composable Storefront, which provided a fast, app-like experience on the web and a modern headless architecture. Such an approach would allow the site to take advantage of native mobile device features without requiring the end user to visit an app store.

“We believed that a progressive web app, or headless architecture, would allow us to achieve the speed and ease of usability you get with a native app. And through this approach, we’d be able to better serve a much wider customer audience,” German says.

“Shopping on our site is so much more enjoyable now. We’re creating an online experience that is fun to spend time with and makes it easy to find what you need,” shared Beth Heeney, Duluth Trading’s Director of Ecommerce.

Duluth Trading has seen considerable improvements in site speed: Across the board, pages load at least a second faster than on its previous site. That’s leading to higher conversions across the board.

“Our new platform makes us more digitally nimble so that we can continuously improve our business,” German says. “At the end of the day, it gives us more flexibility and tools to serve our customers.”

How does Duluth Trading’s new headless architecture make the site more flexible? It’s much easier to test new components for the site and pull third-party components in and out without worrying about components negatively interacting with each other. In addition, new releases are easier because the headless architecture allows developers to release small chunks of components over time, instead of deploying a whole website at once.

AJ Sutera, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer and Logistics at Duluth Trading, also mentions the boost in morale and motivation that engineers get from working with a new, modern platform and a headless architecture.

Going headless can be a huge undertaking, so to accelerate the time to value, Duluth Trading deployed Salesforce Composable Storefront as the framework of its new site. The Composable Storefront is a fast and flexible storefront for headless commerce that provides the speed, flexibility, and user-first ecommerce experience that the company leaders sought.

“Partnering with Salesforce allowed us to work on serving the customer and the business problems we’re trying to solve rather than being completely focused on the technology,” says Sutera. “The headless architecture allowed us to bring best-of-breed scalability, performance, and ease of test automation into building the site.”

Once Duluth Trading had laid the groundwork for its new site, it layered in the additional best-of-breed solutions like a new headless CMS with Amplience.

“The headless architecture will make our site faster to develop, and it’s coupled with a new CMS that makes our site a lot easier to manage daily,” German says.

With Salesforce on its side and 64labs leading the implementation, Duluth Trading had a new storefront and a fully headless architecture in just 5 months.