Exclusive Q&A: Carhartt reinforces e-commerce for holidays
Carhartt is looking to build on record e-commerce performance it achieved during the 2022 holiday season.
Chain Store Age recently conducted an exclusive interview with Donavan Marchywka, director, digital solutions, Carhartt, to get insight on how and why the leading workwear brand revamped and continues to optimize its e-commerce environment.
Carhartt deployed the SAP Commerce Cloud e-commerce platform in time for the 2022 holiday season and sees e-commerce as a major component of its growth strategy.
How is Carhartt preparing for the 2023 holiday e-commerce season?
As in years past, Carhartt is engaging with SAP and our third-party performance team to test the capabilities of the SAP Commerce Cloud application to ensure that it can support our traffic and sales goals for the 2023 holiday season. We will run simulated load tests across our entire landscape to make sure we can support our business objectives.
These load tests provide key optimization opportunities that will be used by Carhartt’s development team and our third-party vendors to improve our performance and stability.
Why did Carhartt decide to implement a new e-commerce platform?
Carhartt identified e-commerce as a key area of growth for the company. We needed a platform that would enable our business partners to dynamically connect with our consumers, while maintaining a high level of performance. Additionally, we needed a platform that would bring innovation and technology enablement to the market.
What made you select the SAP Commerce Cloud solution?
The Commerce Cloud platform provided a high level of prebuilt integration to Carhartt’s existing SAP S/4 Hana ERP software implementation. SAP was able to demonstrate a robust, highly performant application that addressed all our needs with an aggressive roadmap for future enhancements. We also liked that SAP is consistently investing in its Commerce Cloud platform to remain a best-in-class solution.
How did SAP Commerce Cloud perform during the 2022 holiday season?
Our e-commerce infrastructure performed extremely well during our critical holiday selling season in late 2022. We worked closely with SAP support and our third-party performance team to make sure that the system was properly tuned and scaled.
The platform helped Carhartt achieve record numbers for the Thanksgiving/Cyber Monday weekend. Another key element was the ability of the platform to support business agility during the holidays without any impact to our consumers.
[Read more: Carhartt launches workwear partnership with Lowe's]
Headquartered in Dearborn, Mich., with approximately 5,400 employees worldwide, Carhartt is family-owned and managed by the descendants of the company's founder, Hamilton Carhartt.