From brick-and-mortar to digital leaders: Running's transformation journey with Vaimo
Runnings is a privately held retailer selling an extensive selection of pet supplies and sporting goods, including hunting and fishing equipment, clothing and footwear, lawn and garden supplies, housewares, tools, farm supplies, toys, and outdoor equipment. Founded in 1947 and owned by the Dennis and Adele Reed Family, the company currently has 80 stores and employs more than 2,700 workers across twelve states.
The challenge
With a highly successful and rapidly growing business, Runnings established a strong brick-and-mortar presence with a trusted household name brand. However, the digital aspects of the business were lagging behind. Their partner and solution at the time could not deliver the performance, scalability, and features that both staff and customers expected. As the digital channel grew increasingly important for future growth, Runnings recognized the importance of providing both existing loyalists and new customers a digital experience on par with the industry leaders.
Runnings wanted to quickly catch up in the digital realm and offer their customers a best-in-class digital experience that both supplemented and strengthened their excellent in-store offering. They also wanted to upgrade their existing Adobe Commerce platform and replace the legacy Order Management solution.
The goal of Runnings.com is to drive revenue, but also support in-store sales and the overall customer experience. As such, Runnings wanted to add new frontend features, more pricing options, a better store locator, and better product information.
Runnings' pain points
- An outdated frontend experience
- Poor performance and an inferior mobile experience
- Inability to meet the omnichannel needs of customers
- A mismatch between order management and fulfillment processes
- Poor SEO performance
- Poor ecommerce conversion rate
- A limited number of options available in the checkout for payment and shipping
- Poor product information management
Search, browse, and filtering
The search function, powered by Klevu, is especially useful for mobile users. Customers can easily search and browse products and use the store selector to choose their nearest store.
Customers can filter by category, brand, price, and availability depending on the stock at their chosen store location. The filter function is important because of Runnings’ extensive catalog, which has many different categories, brands, models, and local inventory.
When customers choose a store in the store selector, the information provided is relevant to that store, including pricing, availability, prom
Store locator & store selector
With 80 stores spread out over the U.S. and more opening, it’s critical to get an omnichannel customer journey just right. A majority of the customers use a combination of digital and physical touchpoints and the local store is a key part of both the pre-purchase planning phase and the purchase and delivery. The store selector serves as a vital element to seamlessly guide the customer through a fairly feature-rich and asynchronous journey. The store selector reflects the live inventory in the customer’s current store along with local promotions and pricing.
Much of the activity before, during, and after the purchase occurs in connection to the local store, and reflecting that digitally is important to Runnings.
Omnichannel pricing
Runnings has a complex pricing structure with a mix of online and offline price lists. In addition to this, the offline price lists are sometimes localized. A given product can have different prices across different stores, due to local competition and marketing strategies.
The price displayed online will depend on a number of factors, depending on whether the customer has selected a specific store. The Runnings website fully utilizes advanced price rules, and the logic is based on MAP/MSRP (minimum advertised price, manufacturer’s suggested retail price) using different price display logic, and more. The omnichannel pricing build was implemented as an extension of the native pricing framework.
Multi-store inventory management
Runnings uses every store as a fulfillment source and several options based on the native MSI feature were implemented to meet the business needs in this area. The logic for allocating inventory for orders is, again, running with a specific microservices build allowing it to run smoothly for large orders. Those shipments being critical due to the heavy internal replenishment costs being a key factor in the calculation, together with minimum quantity rules for every physical store.
Akeneo PIM with Microservice add-ons
With over 110,000 products and 2,200 product models ranging from clothing to gas and soil, Vaimo had to devise a way to manage the complex data structure. Vaimo used the Akeneo community edition to ensure the creative possibilities were endless and tailored the platform to Runnings’ needs.
Vaimo built Runnings’ specific capabilities with an array of Microservices, ensuring that the company’s website could handle every product configuration and setup effortlessly and efficiently. Vaimo also provides ongoing support for the Runnings PIM solution.
Key moments and features
- Replaced Magento Order Management with a dedicated OMS in Magento Admin
- Custom Allocation Algorithm, a functionality that allocates orders to the stores/sources based on defined rules (fewest number of order splits, the shortest distance to customer shipping address using UPS zones logic)
- Ship-to-home and In-store pick up delivery options
- Possibility to ship to store from other locations
- Store locator that allows selection from 80 physical locations, prices, stock, store details, and pick up of placed orders in the selected store
- Extensive product catalog with 110,000+ products which is now managed in Akeneo
- Advanced Pricing including MAP, MSRP, tier pricing, store-specific prices, online prices, and different combinations of prices
- Integration with Horizon ERP for product base data, inventory, prices, sales, and gift card payment
- First data payment and Signifyd for Fraud Protection
- Sezzle payment option where you can buy now, and pay later
- Amasty brands and Amasty blog modules
- Listrak for email marketing
- Avalara for tax calculation
- Yotpo for reviews
- 3rd party hosting (Webscale)
- Klevu for search
“Before working with Vaimo, we were reluctant to invest in digital marketing to drive traffic to our website. Our digital storefront didn’t match the spirit of our company or our in-store experience. We wanted the performance, the user experience, and the design to exceed our customers’ expectations. Our new website complements our in-store experience, and meets our customers with the quality they expect from Runnings.”
Terry KrizDirector, Information Services at Runnings
Future plans
Runnings has several new features in their pipeline, including dropship, additional payment methods, personalization, promotions, improved search and filtering, more omnichannel features, and improved order management.
Vaimo is currently enhancing Runnings’ Akeneo PIM solution to allow vendors to import and edit their data via vendor profiles. The data then automatically syncs with Akeneo. This means that manually uploading spreadsheets to Akeneo is a thing of the past. This project allows Runnings to bring more products online and decrease the time to market for new products.
