Everlane goes to market 4x faster with Builder

Founded in 2011 with the intent to challenge a notoriously black-box retail industry, Everlane built a brand anchored in transparency. Customers are given more context than they ever knew existed - the cost-to-produce every item, supply chain details, factory locations, and the environmental impact of the materials.

As one of the pioneers of brand-first e-commerce, Everlane has set an incredibly high bar for the digital experience they provide. What they sell is only part of the picture; what matters more is how they engage customers through hyper-customized, rich, dynamic content on their website. For the Everlane team, this was no easy feat.

With Builder, Everlane publishes over 100 variations of its homepage a month. Site merchandisers are able to personalize the experience based on various contextual data points, including device, new vs. return visitors, previous shopping behavior, locale, and more without relying on developers.

• An API-based content platform that can scale with the business
• Flexibility to add and test new layouts and content types
• The ability for non-technical people to update the site, easily
• Removing the dependency on developers for content updates

• Site merchandisers and designers are creating hyper-personalized experiences
• Products are launched on the site 4x faster with Builder
• Engineers can focus on new features instead of workarounds for their less-than-optimal homegrown platform
• Developers are no longer required for content updates
• Builder's headless CMS capabilities means engineering can add functionality quickly and easily
• Builder's API-first CMS is built to scale with Everlane's business

Prior to Builder, Everlane used a homegrown platform for everything from merchandising to content updates. As a result, the retailer faced the following challenges:

• Marketing relied on developers for site updates. Developers were required to make and push any changes, no matter how small.
• No true personalization. Content couldn't be meaningfully customized, which meant that each product had to stay within the same template and look the same way. This lack of customization limited the team in other ways, such as hindering their ability to run performant split tests and hyper-personalizing the shopping experience.

It was clear that something had to change. The only question was if these challenges could be solved internally, or if a solution exists on the market.

James Rosen, CMS team lead and software architect at Everlane, took the million-dollar question head on: should they build or buy the CMS platform the team needs for their next chapter? He evaluated a wide range of options, from traditional headless CMSes to digital experience platforms (DXP), and everything in between. He was looking for a solution that was feature rich, simple to implement, and user-friendly for non-technical users. They found all of that and more with Builder, namely:

• Autonomy for designers, marketers, and merchandisers to build and optimize experiences
• The flexibility and tools required to create hyper-personalized experiences
• Removed cross-team dependencies resulting in increased agility

"We're launching 2-3 products a week, which means we need a CMS that can keep pace with this cadence while meeting the execution standards of our brand," said Rosen. "Other retailers may tell their story exclusively through product merchandising, but Everlane's site is all about marrying creative content and product in interesting ways."

With Builder, Everlane enjoys the best of both worlds: the ability to test and deliver highly converting, hyper-personalized experiences without relying on developers to push changes out.

With Builder, you can easily create fully bespoke shopping experiences, as well as impose a more strict design system.

After the Everlane team experienced just how easy it was to update high-impact pages, such as the homepage, while maintaining brand guidelines with a few creative liberties, they knew they had found their solution. Everyone, from the developers to the site merchandisers to the product managers, felt empowered to gain autonomy over the website with Builder's powerful drag and drop visual editor.

While Everlane follows a strict design system on key pages, like the homepage, they are constantly releasing new products and collections where they create more bespoke experiences in Builder. This lets them convey a unique story for each product release.

In the past, updating the website involved writing custom code, which followed standard review-release-ship cycles. Any change to the site, no matter how small, would trigger this process to restart. "For example, we'd launch a new color of jeans, which meant the engineers would have to start from scratch. This was a lot of work for relatively low-value changes, like changing images," Rosen said. "With Builder, we are able to launch our new product(s) without added complexity or chaos."

The increased agility was felt across the entire site. Their popular Denim guide took a third of the time to create on Builder with new styles implemented in a matter of minutes (compared to 4 hours of dev work). And, to the Everlane team, the value-add of Builder continues to expand.