As Levi Strauss & Co. pivots to a DTC-first retailer, teams across the company are focused on meeting our fans wherever they shop and delivering the best experiences across all channels. We know the stakes are high. 71% of consumers are channel agnostic, and over 80% are Companies say customer experience is just as important as a company's products and services, so they know they need to get it right across all channels. This includes e-commerce, a channel that has grown at a healthy pace in recent years. It grew 13% last year and is expected to show strong momentum in 2024, increasing 19% in the second quarter, driven by double-digit growth in the United States.
This growth is largely thanks to the team's focus on improving our digital foundations, specifically two key areas: site experience and product storytelling.
Site Experience: Speed, Search, and Navigation
Over the last year, the team has been working to improve the overall site experience, conducting extensive analysis of the three fundamental elements that make up a best-in-class retail site: site speed, search, and navigation.
Site speed is a key conversion factor and every few seconds counts. 3 Second Delay If your site takes too long to load, it can cause consumers to abandon it. With this in mind, our digital team has overhauled our rendering model over the past year, moving from primarily client-side rendering to a hybrid model that combines server-side and client-side rendering. This has significantly improved our page load times and SEO rankings, making our site accessible to even more consumers. The team has also updated our site's loading components to ensure that only the necessary components are loaded at any given time to further optimize the loading process. We have also created a team focused on site performance, reducing our site updates and releases to twice a week (every 3 weeks) while simultaneously running performance tests to identify issues and deliver fixes live quickly.
These improvements have paid off big time: site speed has increased by over 40% in the last year, and app launch times have decreased by 50%. This groundwork is just the beginning – with the foundation in place, the team is identifying new opportunities to further enhance the site experience.
The second core component of a great retail site is search. After all, if consumers can't find your products, they can't buy them. To prevent this from happening to our fans, we've partnered with a leading third-party vendor to implement a new search solution that surfaces more relevant search results based on consumers' search terms, helping consumers find products faster and easier and converting those searches into purchases. This new search engine has resulted in a 10% improvement in search-to-product rates to date.
The third area the team is addressing is navigation. We wanted to ensure that the site's navigation reflected both how consumers shop and what their expectations are for shopping on the site, so we focused on truly understanding consumers' mental models. Product and UX leaders dug deep into site analytics to learn about consumer behavior on the site and partnered with our consumer insights team to hear directly from consumers. We then used these insights to reorganize our navigation options to better align with consumer expectations. For example, many consumers told us they expected to see products grouped first by gender and then by category, and now the site's navigation aligns with that expectation.
“From the beginning, we've been committed to listening to and learning from our consumers. The consumer is our north star, and we've always known to align our actions with their expectations and needs,” explains Jason Sack, UX Design Director at LS&Co. “Maintaining this level of consumer obsession allows us to create an easier shopping experience for our consumers while also driving meaningful results for our business.”
The result of this consumer obsession? A 20% increase in consumers visiting product detail pages.
Product Storytelling: Enhanced Images, Fit Features, and Video Walkthroughs
Like any omnichannel retailer, we use all channels to present our products in the best possible light and help all our fans understand how our products fit into their wardrobe and lives. We stock a wide range of products on our e-commerce channels, and we want our fans to always be able to find the perfect size without having to try on our products. We heard from consumers that three features matter most: rise, stretch fabric, and leg opening. To address this, the team rolled out product highlights around these three features earlier this year, making it faster and easier for consumers to find their perfect size.
Another way we've improved our product storytelling is by enhancing our product imagery and videos. For example, this year we enhanced our denim lifestyle imagery for women, which is head-to-toe imagery that shows how women can incorporate our denim lifestyle products into their own unique style. Our site also added dynamic walk-on and walk-off videos for select products, which give consumers a better idea of the look and fit of our products. Both have been successful additions to our site and have led to increased add-to-cart numbers.
“We're constantly innovating and experimenting to provide our fans with the best e-commerce experience,” said Priya Buening, vice president of U.S. e-commerce at LS&Co. “We're proud of the progress we've made in improving site speed, search, navigation and product storytelling, and look forward to continuing to enhance our digital capabilities and offerings. Our e-commerce channels are a key pillar of our DTC-first strategy, and we're committed to exceeding our customers' expectations across all channels, no matter where they shop.”
