Established in 1890, the United States Polo Association (USPA) is the official governing body for the sport of Polo. The organization sells its branded apparel across 160 countries in over 1,100 stores. But despite its global reach, the brand lacked a global website.
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“We needed to design and develop a website that could both speak to a global audience and offer localized information to our customers in various markets,” said Jose Nino, VP of Global Digital & E-Commerce Strategy at USPA Global Licensing, Inc. “Without much of a digital presence, we were missing an opportunity to tell a consistent brand story and drive visitors from all over the world into their local stores to purchase our licensed apparel and gifts.
The existing content management system (CMS) used by USPA was limited in providing support for localized environments, so Jose knew he would need to find a more robust CMS and a strong partner to see the implementation through. Having worked with translations provider Translations.com in a previous role, Jose reached out to see if the company could provide any recommendations.
Translations.com referred Nansen and after careful consideration, USPA enlisted the agency’s expertise to help it build the new U.S. Polo Assn. global site and branded microsites on the Contentful platform.
“Experience and value were really the two driving factors behind our decision to work with Nansen,” said Jose. “They have a very strong portfolio of clients and proven experience with both creating localized environments and Contentful, the CMS platform we had selected.”
With an ambitious goal of launching dozens of locales, Nansen set to work. To kick the project off, they facilitated a workshop with the USPA team to rapidly reach a consensus on the website information architecture, structure, and design direction. Nansen then created designs for the new global brand site that would convey the premium aesthetic and position of the USPA brand to a global audience.
Next, Nansen set out to build the site in Contentful. One of the first items on their list was to integrate the website with Yext, a store location management system. Yext provides a central database with consumer access to all global store locations so that no matter where a customer is, the website displays relevant, localized information. For example, when a customer visits the website in Milan, the site automatically recognizes the visitor’s location and loads only nearby stores in Milan.
Because apparel collections (e.g. spring/summer, fall, vacation) are often region-specific, Nansen also needed to build in the capability to load assets specific to the visitor’s location. To complete the localized experience, Translations.com was integrated to ensure the appropriate language would load for each unique visitor.
In addition to the integrations with Yext and Translations.com, Nansen designed and developed an interactive timeline, collections pages and galleries, support for video and news content, and an integration with Foursixty for USPA’s Instagram feed - all while making it easy for the team at Nansen and USPA to continually add and update the website content.
“When we initially purchased Contentful, we thought there was no way we’d ever reach the bandwidth in their top tier package. Now we’re increasing bandwidth with Contentful’s Enterprise version to help address the additional traffic,” Jose said.
Every month since launch, USPA has seen more and more visitors on their site. The new global website averages tens of thousands of visitors each month with over 100,000 unique visitors in the first three months post-launch. Visitor engagement on the site is also up with the bounce rate at just 15%.
“Our visitors land on the website, view our collection pages, watch a video or two and then click on the shop to see where they can purchase what they’ve seen,” said Jose. “We’re doing exactly what we set out to do - drive purchase intent to our licensees.”The licensing and franchising organizations USPA works with could not be happier.“They recognize that we’re investing in the brand and also in our licensees by pushing traffic to their stores,” added Jose. “Very few global brands have a website like this, and it’s a wonder why when you consider the benefits to both brand and retailer.”
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