As an icon of American sports, pop, and street style, New Era needed a flexible and customizable platform to localize in the highly unique Hong Kong market - and that’s why New Era chose Shopify Plus as its Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) platform. With international operations managed via SAP and local partners managing offline stores via traditional distribution channels, New Era worked closely with leading Shopify Plus partner and experts, Wave Commerce, to build a competitive DTC architecture and strategy for the Hong Kong market. 

New Era Hong Kong launches online DTC to engage and nurture local consumers 

As part of their DTC launch in Hong Kong, Wave Commerce worked closely with the New Era team to map out a DTC launch plan, including ecommerce customer experience, marketing, customer support, order fulfillment, returns and exchanges.

On Shopify Plus, New Era successfully manages over 1,000 SKUs, with new weekly product launches, and leverages Shopify’s platform capabilities to offer gifts, bundles and promotion campaigns to drive new customer acquisition and growth for the new DTC site. 

“You see New Era everywhere you go in Hong Kong, whether it be a cap or bag on the street, or sponsorship of a sporting event. When working with New Era Hong Kong to build their Shopify Store, we wanted to make sure it stood out in all the noise, catering different Shopper needs, making online shopping easier than ever especially with a brand with over 1000+ SKU. Besides, it has to be ease of use for all the teams because business success replies on all functional team from marketing, supply chain, operation, finance and management.  And we did just that, an iconic DTC experience for an iconic brand supported by a consolidate operation flow."

Jessica Chan,  Head of Omnichannel, Wave Commerce

An agile and future-focused commerce-centric tech stack

Taking an ecosystem approach, Shopify-first solutions and integrations were selected to further enhance the New Era site feature and functionality. This not only creates a superior customer experience for New Era’s quality-conscious customers, but provides New Era a strong foundation for continued growth and expansion of its commerce operations in the future.

Klaviyo

Wave Commerce worked closely with New Era to implement Klaviyo, including advanced customer segmentation, with highly relevant and personalized email product recommendations, automated flows, and tracking features for analysis to ensure constant optimization. 

Gorgias

The ability to effectively manage and ensure quality customer support is important and with this in mind, Wave Commerce worked to implement Gorgias, a leading helpdesk for customer support. With Gorgias, New Era provides self-service customer support with responses covering all the most common questions, including personalized tracking updates integrated with the customer’s order history. 

Customer Acquisition 

Without having a DTC channel in the past, we worked closely with the New Era team with their initial DTC launch campaigns to drive traffic to the new ecommerce store to build their DTC customer base. Running Facebook and Instagram advertising, we also monitored performance and continued to optimize ads as well as overall store performance.

Converting new customers into lifelong fans - with OMNI by Wave Commerce

New Era’s success is built on its community engagement and strong connection with local sports and lifestyle culture events. New Era wanted to ensure that they could not only capture all of the contact information from their marketing and engagements, but also nurture the community with their on-brand spirit. 

With OMNI by Wave Commerce, New Era's customers can access their membership account directly via the Shopify “My Account” page. Once inside, they are greeted by their expert-designed and customer-centric loyalty portal, where they can see the information of their membership tier, track tier progress and upgrade status, redeem rewards, and generate a unique code to pay with points for future orders. With OMNI by Wave Commerce, New Era is able to provide a highly engaging and best-in-class loyalty experience straight from their DTC go-to-market launch. 

With careful consideration and expert guidance, New Era HK has a strong platform and infrastructure for future growth and is agile to pivot where and when the business wishes.