Mizuno Usa

Mizuno’s athletic apparel and equipment is renowned for its highly innovative, sophisticated gear technology–many products offering professional athlete level performance to everyday individuals.
To mirror that customer promise, Mira Commerce adopted a flexible, commerce-first approach for Mizuno through new microservices layers.

This new architecture is capable of creating unique content experiences without the friction associated with the traditional monolithic structure. Indeed, the microservices approach has provided an immediate 13% improvement in server connection time.

The new microservices approach to systems and third-party services integrations, inspired by composable commerce, has enabled the Mizuno teams to bring their brand vision to life and deliver relevant, personalized experiences that delight customers through Emarsys’ customer data platform. The move to Emarsys’ CDP has increased
site traffic by 13% and resulted in a 14% increase in Average Order Value (AOV).

Mira Commerce has orchestrated the ability to quickly and efficiently integrate best of breed third-party services into a seamlessly connected and business-ready solution that keeps Mizuno in complete control no matter what service providers they choose
to engage and/or change.

Mira Commerce Scales Mizuno’s Global
Business by 21% with Microservices
While an all-in-one ecommerce platform certainly has its use case,
a global brand like Mizuno has business complexities that require more than a monolithic digital solution. A monolithic ecommerce solution features a coupled front- and back-end system that creates issues over time as the business requirements change and technologies evolve.

Mizuno’s global business requires the agility to make rapid changes without the unintended consequences of damaging system interdependencies. As a long-standing client, Mira Commerce knew the next stage of Mizuno’s business evolution hinged on leveraging composable commerce architecture.

At the very heart of composable commerce (the building blocks that make up the composite structure) is microservices. A microservices architecture offers a solution that separates different business requirements into unique services that intercommunicate thereby offering maximum speed and flexibility.

Instead of breaking an entire structure to change one unit, microservices offers a decentralized and decoupled approach wherein the tech stack can easily be manipulated by altering
the microservices layer. This kind of modular, composable approach enables Mira Commerce’s selection of best-in-breed solutions
for each of Mizuno’s unique business needs assembled into
a customized tech stack. Furthermore, this approach has enabled
a 13% improvement in server connection time.

Mira Commerce guided Mizuno’s decision towards architecting
a composable commerce solution for their omnichannel North American business. Composable commerce is a newly coined term used to describe functionally complete software components that
are used as building blocks for out-of-the-box applications and custom built application experiences, where microservices are
a key layer in connecting the disparate applications.

The composable commerce solution approach enables Mira Commerce’s developers to build and deliver powerful customer experiences across the lifecycle journey while maintaining a modular tech stack for Mizuno’s ease of scalability and extensibility.

One such example of this composability is the sophisticated set
of microservices Mira Commerce built to serve as a data exchange layer between the Emarsys CDP and Kibo’s ecommerce platform.

Housed in AWS, the triggered email application is a custom built component that leverages important data points to “trigger” communications at critical moments of the customer journey.
Sending personalized communications is an imperative part of the customer experience where certain events are prompts that use the API to link an action (such as a purchase) to an email send, providing the data needed for the message and releasing the communication. These communication sends are event-based and highly personalized to the associated triggering event.

Mira Commerce’s custom built microservices layer for Emarsys’ triggered campaigns is the solution for sending time-critical messages via the customer’s preferred channel and format to ensure that delivery is immediate and effective. The new CDP marketing program has meant a 13% increase in total site traffic and an overall 14% increase in AOV. 

Solving Complex Business Challenges
with Custom Built Microservices
Mira Commerce architected and developed a microservices middleware application that has multiple key layers to manage the product catalog data sync across multiple third-party services.

The application is responsible for compiling, and normalizing the full catalogs from both Mizuno USA and Mizuno Canada with controls that allow Mizuno to connect existing and new services, select the specific data and transform the data into format that the services require.

For Emarsys, the required product catalog data format is saved on
the Kibo ecommerce platform. For each catalog, useful information such as localized prices, inventories and availability are all preserved and maintained to allow for the validation of data accuracy post file export.

Once the data is ready to be published, the application creates a new version of the feed file and publishes it into the required public URL. To prevent data loss, prior to the publish step the application also saves the latest catalog export as a backup.

An integral, custom-built refund management application is crucial
to Mizuno’s business operations and to ensure customer experience.

The refund process is scheduled to run daily and it creates a delta refund export which includes data from each Mizuno North American (USA and Canada) website to be saved to Kibo’s Order Management System.

The application uses the available API from their OMS to fetch the required refund information and once the data is ready to be published, the process adds the information to the order feed file. Mira Commerce built this unique layer to sync directly with Emarsys wherein the refund data is processed using the order send function.

The process is scheduled to run daily and the component delivers
the rates to multiple endpoints for conversion rate ingestion. A few
of these key endpoints include order export, refunds and cart management and purchase commands.

Quick Time to Market Product Launches
for Unprecedented Growth
In the sporting industry, only the latest and greatest survives.
In an effort to serve their loyal fan base, Mizuno is continually innovating and producing new athletic apparel and equipment designed to aid performance and exceed expectations.
Mira Commerce helped Mizuno launch over 12 new sporting collaborations and products in just 4 short months.Each new product launch serves as a microsite with brand story, in-depth videos and rich imagery to communicate the product’s specific purpose and the narrative behind its innovation. New launches typically involve brand ambassadors or sports influencers while ensuring the products comply with global regulations and multiple currencies. With Mira Commerce’s direct support, Mizuno successfully developed and deployed all new product launches leading to unprecedented growth for the global brand in North America.

Mira Commerce Future-Proofs Mizuno’s Logistics

With over 5,000 retail reseller locations globally, Mizuno scaling its DTC channel had to be a calculated venture supported by Mira Commerce’s business relationship.

To avoid direct channel conflict, the physical reseller locations and their available inventory of Mizuno products were included as an option for fulfilling online customer orders. Mira Commerce has architected and developed extensions to Kibo’s Order Management Solution (OMS) to fit Mizuno’s specific business requirements and
to adapt to their evolving business needs, ever-changing market demands and ongoing global changes.

Kibo’s OMS is designed for scale and flexibility as a cloud-based solution that enables Mizuno to quickly deploy and leverage dynamic fulfillment models that help drive the exponential revenue Mizuno is looking to achieve now and in the future. 

Mira Commerce built a custom microservices layer to manage the OMS data required by third-party services across two countries and two separate currencies. This component uses the available OMS API to fetch all required order information and publishes the data across various data warehousing systems.

Not only has this custom built layer helped with order processing and order fulfillment, it has also allowed Mizuno to streamline the fulfillment process to better manage inventory across brick and mortar stores, improve warehouse management, and bolster customer experience with less out of stock/order delay friction.