With its history deeply ingrained in sports heritage as the exclusive supplier of on-field caps for Major League Baseball, New Era Cap Company Inc. is a leading provider of athletic headwear and sports accessories. Founded in 1920, New Era was initially set up as a wholesale business using a business-to-business (B2B) model to sell its merchandise to sports fans through major retailers.

Along the way, its iconic caps became a hit beyond the sporting arena. Movie stars, models, musicians, and other celebrities were as likely to be spotted sporting New Era merchandise as athletes and baseball stars.

Seeing its caps increasingly sought by style-conscious consumers as a genuine and authentic fashion accessory, New Era evolved as a consumer lifestyle brand and adapted its go-to-market strategy with a business-to-consumer (B2C) offering. Committed to following a cloud-first approach, the company partnered with trusted SAP partner and leading provider of e-commerce software implementation expertise EPAM Systems Inc. New Era knew that to be the perfect fit for consumers, its new e-commerce Web site had to go beyond selling products and to build its brand story.

New Era built its new e-commerce landscape on the SAP Commerce Cloud solution, running on a proprietary SAP software infrastructure. Befitting its consumer lifestyle brand, this included a sleek B2C Web site and an enhanced B2B portal with the same intuitive look and feel, giving B2B and B2C customers a responsive and simplified omnichannel experience.

Over the following years, as rapid advances in multi- and omnichannel retail, social commerce, and personalization changed the dynamics of digital commerce, New Era moved to get ahead of these trends.

Migrating to the public cloud

Wanting to be able to handle traffic spikes around the globe, the company needed to take advantage of hyperscale and so looked to migrate its digital commerce platform to the public cloud.

Once again, New Era teamed up with the strategic consulting and software engineering firm EPAM. Leveraging SAP Services and Support offerings, New Era’s digital commerce landscape was reshaped for the future by migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud in the public cloud.

This public cloud offering on Microsoft Azure provides native integration with SAP Customer Experience solutions, which reduces the implementation effort through the use of existing connectors and built-in integration flows.

Keeping ahead of customer trends

Using a single commerce solution for B2B and B2C, New Era can now quickly respond to changing market requirements without having to reconfigure its back-end infrastructure. A cloud portal allows operational tasks to be managed through self-service tools, and Kubernetes is used for automating application deployment.

This architecture allows the lifestyle brand to build and deploy applications quickly to enrich the buying experience. And it includes a Cap Builder tool, which allows businesses or individuals to directly order a wide variety of New Era’s hats and caps customized with a specific brand or the customer’s preferred design.

With SAP Commerce Cloud in the public cloud, New Era has robust e-commerce capabilities, scalability to serve huge traffic volumes in multiple geographies, and the flexibility to introduce new features quickly – all of which is keeping it ahead of customer trends.

To learn more about New Era’s single commerce solution for B2B and B2C in the public cloud, take a look at the business transformation study, “New Era: Restyling Digital Commerce for Sports, Fashion, and Street Wear Headwear Customers.”