Business Impact Article - Posted 8/24/2009

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Quiksilver

Online Retailer Keeps Web Sites Fresh, Costs Lower with Timesaving Software Tool

STORY AT A GLANCE

Online retail is brutally tough, and companies can quickly find themselves with more expenses than profits. Successful retailers have to keep their operating costs low and their Web sites fresh to be successful online.

Surf-culture clothing retailer Quiksilver Americas used Microsoft® software to create a clever product management tool called Bob that shortcuts the onerous administrative work involved in posting, refreshing, and managing thousands of online products. Instead of juggling dozens of spreadsheets and manually posting data to File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites, Quiksilver merchandisers can create compelling marketing copy and manage Web commerce elements in a single user-friendly tool. One developer created Bob in a few weeks and linked it to an existing content management investment. Thanks to Bob, Quiksilver has been able to eliminate the search for spreadsheets and create a single repository of online product data that is easy to manage. Bob saves merchandisers hundreds of hours annually, giving them more time to focus on being creative, attracting customers, and boosting sales. Bob also helps Quiksilver keep headcount low, which is critical to turning a profit in today’s tough retail environment. “Cutty & Scratchy? That is how you would describe the reef at Deserts or the rocks at Lowers. These trunks can be worn at both.”

That’s the product description given for the Quiksilver Cutty & Scratchy Boardshorts on the Web site. It’s short, sweet, and evocative of the Quiksilver Americas brand that embodies youthfulness, an adventurous spirit, and passionate individuality. There’s a lot of merchandising power packed into that brief description, and Quiksilver merchandisers have their hands full keeping three of the company’s branded Web sites fresh with clever product descriptions and compelling images that speak to style-conscious teens and young adults.

Promoting and managing 6,800 items across three sites (www.quiksilver.com, www.roxy.com, and www.dcshoes.com) threatened to swamp Quiksilver merchandisers in a tsunami of administrative work. To keep them focused on riding the wave of ever-changing youth tastes, Quiksilver used Microsoft® software to create a powerful content management tool that dramatically shortcuts and simplifies the process of posting and managing product descriptions on its Web sites. Merchandisers have more time to spend being creative, and Quiksilver has a healthier bottom line by reining in operating costs even while product lines are growing.

KEEP MERCHANDISERS MERCHANDISING

Quiksilver Americas started out in the 1970s as a board-short company serving surfers and skateboarders. Since then, the company has grown into a multinational apparel and accessory company with approximately 8,000 employees, hundreds of Quiksilver-branded stores, and relationships with thousands of surf shops, skate shops, and other specialty stores around the world. Through its growth, Quiksilver has taken great pains to maintain its original values of youthful independence, individuality, and passion. Every Quiksilver product and shopping experience has to embody these qualities, and that task falls to product and store designers, Web site designers, and merchandisers. “The more time these folks can spend wooing customers, the more successful we are,” says Gary Penn, Director of Interactive at Quiksilver.

However, when Quiksilver launched its first e-commerce site in 2007, the company realized that its retail merchandisers would have to create consumer-friendly product descriptions and images that had not been necessary when selling to a dealer channel. “Before, we only provided rudimentary back-office data such as SKU [stock-keeping unit] numbers, brief product descriptions, and pricing; and dealers created their own merchandising copy and imagery,” explains Penn. “With a consumer-direct model, our merchandisers suddenly had to create and manage more descriptive, brand-rich copy and imagery that would sell product online and keep consumers coming back for more.”

Problem was, product data was scattered around the company in dozens of spreadsheets maintained by various groups, including the dealer team, various supplier management teams, catalog teams, and others. These spreadsheets were formatted differently, updated on different timetables, unwieldy, and vulnerable to errors and haphazard version control. Sifting through this data and translating it into consumer-friendly language in a timely, accurate fashion loomed as a logistical nightmare that would quickly swamp the small online merchandising staff. “We wanted our merchandisers merchandising, not chasing spreadsheets,” Penn says.

“We had no single system of record for our products, and this became a huge problem when we moved online because we needed to present a consistent, accurate face to our online customers,” adds Nicholas Nathanson, Senior Vice President of Direct for Quiksilver. “We needed accurate information on our Web site, and we needed a cost-effective way to keep site content up-to-date and compelling. If our site is not fresh, exciting, and accurate, we can’t sell.”

USING WHAT WE HAD TO BUILD SOMETHING NEW

Nathanson and Penn discussed how painful it was going to be for merchandisers to manage all those product spreadsheets. “We agreed that it would be really nice to have a tool to help them quickly transfer product data to the Web sites,” Penn says. Years before, Quiksilver had made a significant investment in the source code for a content management system (WebSuite from LEVEL Studios) to manage its original marketing Web site, and wanted to continue to use WebSuite to manage portions of its e-commerce sites.

While WebSuite was not designed as an e-commerce platform and could not accommodate the kind of dynamic product management capability that Quiksilver merchandisers now needed, it did have a flexible and modular architecture built on the Microsoft .NET Framework. David Dvorak, Senior .NET Developer at Quiksilver, used Microsoft development software to extend WebSuite with a tool—affectionately and arbitrarily christened Bob—that speeds the process of transferring product data to the e-commerce system. Dvorak worked with merchandisers to figure out what they needed and created Bob in just four months of part-time effort, a U.S.$30,000 investment. “Creating Bob using Microsoft software was the natural choice, since we needed a flexible system that could adapt to our changing business needs,” Dvorak says.

Penn estimates that building a tool like Bob using a non-Microsoft development tool set would have been a 1,000-hour project costing close to U.S.$200,000 and requiring outside resources. Replacing WebSuite with a new content management system would have required an additional investment. “Without the Microsoft tool set, we would not have pursued either of these options,” Penn says. “We were able to make use of software we already owned and the developer skills we already had on staff to build something completely new and wonderful.”

“Bob saves us hundreds of hours annually spent chasing down data. We’re in a very difficult economic environment today, especially in retail. The more efficient we can be, the better. We are able to add new products and brands without increasing our staff.” Gary Penn Director of Interactive, Quiksilver

FREEING MERCHANDISERS TO GROW THE BUSINESS

In addition to helping merchandisers post product data to the Web sites, Bob replaced the many product spreadsheets circulating at Quiksilver and became the company’s single system of record for online products. “Bob has given us one repository of online product data that everyone uses,” Nathanson says. “This assures us that our Web copy is accurate and in sync with other departments. We can’t have a Web site with inaccurate data that frustrates the customer. In e-commerce, accuracy helps sales.”

Instead of sorting through spreadsheets and manually transferring data to the commerce sites, merchandisers open the user-friendly Bob tool to create new product entries, edit existing entries, attach images, preview the way new entries will appear on the site, cross-reference products with other products or with featured technologies (such as new fabrics), and accomplish many other tasks with point-and-click simplicity. When the information looks and sounds the way they want it, merchandisers click a button and the information is transferred to the appropriate Web site the next day.

“Before coming to Quiksilver, I worked for another e-commerce company, and merchandisers used spreadsheets to upload product data to an FTP site every day,” says Lisa Skowrup, E-Commerce Merchandise Manager at Quiksilver and a big Bob fan. “There were multiple versions of those spreadsheets and much confusion. When I arrived at Quiksilver, I couldn’t believe this tool. Bob makes my life so much easier.”

Skowrup and her merchandising colleagues at Roxy and DC Shoes, as well as the product coordinators working for them, use Bob every day to submit new copy to the company’s three Web sites. With approximately 400 items per season for each brand and six seasons of items in the system at any one time, the merchandising team of six people is able to effectively and accurately manage more than 6,800 items in Bob. They can do in minutes what would otherwise take hours or a much larger staff.

“With the efficiencies that Bob provides, I can spend more time analyzing the business, looking at sales figures, seeing what people are buying and not buying, making creative adjustments to the Web site, meeting with other departments about future seasons, and generally adding more value to the business,” Skowrup says.

MORE CREATIVITY = MORE SALES

Quiksilver has found that using clever software to relieve smart, creative employees of mind-numbing administrative work frees them to make the company more successful. “We are running three major-brand Web sites in a very competitive market. If we didn’t have this tool, we wouldn’t be in business,” Nathanson says. “Our products wouldn’t sell as well because our merchandisers wouldn’t have as much time to focus on selling our products. I can’t imagine that we’d be able to romance the customer without Bob, and if you can’t romance the customer, you can’t sell.”

In addition to giving merchandisers more time to create compelling product copy and merchandising ideas, Bob provides sophisticated product management capabilities that merchandisers use to strategically manage product portfolios. For example, if merchandisers want to quickly identify all products made with Diamond Dobby Technology™ (a lightweight, quick-dry fabric), they can sort by this attribute. They also can attach the Diamond Dobby logo to all appropriate products by simply checking a few boxes in Bob. Or, they can use Bob to view all products containing icons such as “Eco-friendly” or “Made with GOR-TEX.” This helps Quiksilver fine-tune its Web sites to feature the latest offerings, top sellers, or market trends, and helps consumers search for products by particular attributes. Merchandisers can also use Bob to feed product information to third-party shopping sites.

LOWERING COSTS TO INCREASE PROFITABILITY

From an operational perspective, Bob enables Quiksilver to get more work done with fewer people. “Bob improves our efficiency, which results in a more profitable online business,” Nathanson says. “We like to make money, and we do that by increasing sales and reducing costs. Bob helps us do both. It’s a tool that benefits our shareholders and our customers.”

Currently, about 15 people use Bob—6 merchandisers and 9 people in other areas of the company—and Penn estimates that each of those employees easily saves two hours a week using Bob. “Bob saves us hundreds of hours annually spent chasing down data,” Penn says. “We’re in a very difficult economic environment today, especially in retail. The more efficient we can be, the better. We are able to add new products and brands without increasing our staff.”

MAKING BOB WORK HARDER

Once Bob was in place to post and manage product data, other teams at Quiksilver realized that they could use it to manage other aspects of the business. For example, Bob replaced multiple store-locator tools used across the company and also gave product groups a central way to manage the podcasts popping up on the three Web sites. “Multiple teams were posting podcasts, mostly videos of our team riders, and managing these was quite laborious,” Penn says. “We simply added a few fields to Bob to handle podcasts and saved these folks a lot of work.”

“Here’s a tool that started out small, wasn’t expensive to create, yet has turned into something extremely powerful and critical to running our online operations,” Penn says. “Bob is a great example of software that yields huge returns to the business by making people more efficient and effective.”

EXECUTIVE BIOGRAPHY

Gary Penn, Director of Interactive at Quiksilver, has been working in IT for 15 years, with the past 12 years focused on the Web and e-commerce. He has worked for large multinational companies including Phillips Publishing and Shimano.  When he's not helping to implement business processes in technology infrastructures, Penn enjoys teaching and practicing Iyengar yoga with his fiancée Catherine in Southern California.