Loading ...Having acquired multiple direct marketing brands in just two years, Orchard Brands is moving all of its e-commerce sites onto a universal technology platform.
Orchard Brands was formed by investment banking firm Golden Gate Capital in 2006 after Golden Gate acquired a number of well-known direct market apparel brands, including Norm Thompson, No. 137 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, Appleseed’s, Blair Corp., No. 118, Draper’s & Damon’s, Gold Violin, Haband, The Tog Shop, and Winter Silks.
Today, each of Orchard Brands’ 10 e-commerce sites run on separate third-party or internally developed e-commerce technology. For instance, Norm Thompson, which operates NormThompson.com, Solutions.com and Sahalie.com, runs on technology currently supplied by MarketLive, while Blair.com is maintained on an IBM WebSphere platform.
But over the next two years Orchard Brands will begin consolidating all of its web sites to an e-commerce platform from Fry Inc. Fry will eventually host all of the sites and supply content management tools and design help, says Orchard Brands’ director of e-commerce technology Maggie Carter. The company also is moving its analytics reporting to Omniture and will use applications from Yesmail and Mercado, respectively, for e-mail marketing and site search.
“The goal is to develop a common platform to provide rich features, functions and user experience in a cost-effective way,” says Blair CEO Shelley Nandkeolyar. “This will give us enhanced capability for all of our brands while lowering our overall cost of ownership.” The project will reduce annual technology operating costs by about 30%, he adds.
Orchard Brands, which generated 2007 online sales of about $235 million and total sales of more than $1.1 billion, will use a universal technology platform to standardize its business rules and processes and increase the speed to market of new catalog and e-commerce brands. “This is all about creating a good experience for our customers from beginning to end,” says Carter.
Golden Gate Capital also will eventually merge its Spiegel brand e-commerce sites, which include Spiegel.com and NewportNews.com, over to the new platform. “The common platform approach provides us an opportunity to leverage both our scale and knowledge base,” says Spiegel senior vice president of e-commerce Tony Chivari. “In the end, this will produce significant cost savings and provide our brands with best-in-class web sites.”
