The North Face

Exploring Peak Performance

Challenge: Bring outdoor adventure online.

The North Face offers the most technically advanced outdoor products on the market and is the choice of the world's most accomplished climbers, mountaineers, extreme skiers, snowboarders and explorers. Fluid has worked with The North Face as their digital agency of record since 2003. In June of 2008, The North Face launched an entirely new, direct-to-consumer web site that has been ringing up record sales and industry accolades.

Challenge: Moving delivering direct sales - and a great experience

TWhen The North Face decided to launch its direct-to-consumer online initiative, it faced a number of critical challenges:

• Deliver a best-in-class shopping experience worthy of the The North Face’s position as the outdoor category leader
• Deliver an integrated brand and shopping experience that builds the brand while delivering tangible financial results
• Deliver technically innovative functionality that supports The North Face’s position as the technical leader in its category
• Create a mechanism for effectively distributing and promoting The North Face’s extensive content resources
• Establish a scalable, robust ecommerce infrastructure on the IBM WebSphere Commerce 6.0 platform

Solution: Merging content, community and commerce

Fluid leveraged its user-centric, persona-driven design process to redesign TheNorthFace.com. The team created detailed user flows for the full range of site visitors, including the “surgical” shoppers who are product-driven, know what they want and desire efficient tools for getting it, and the “enthusiast” that lives for the outdoor lifestyle, desires immersive content and likes to browse. Based on this analysis, Fluid began developing a site intended to realize the following goals:

• Create a visceral, first person experience that speaks to the “core” athlete and draws the desired brand associations.
• Give an effective, integrated presentation of product in the context of compelling interactive content around The North Face-sponsored expeditions and athletes.
• Make that product easy to visualize, review and purchase.
• Build a crisp and precise visual design supporting The North Face’s technical and innovative brand values.
• Design a unique look-and-feel that celebrates the technically advanced nature of The North Face brand, and that is quite distinct from competitor sites, which tend to merge together in appearance.

The resulting site delivers an engaging experience for all shoppers. Product is presented in both a traditional catalog structure and in the context of athletes, sports and expeditions, with compelling promotion of featured items shown in actual real world environments under real world conditions. The site integrates progressive ecommerce best practices, such as Quick Views, Parametric Filtering, Rich Product Visualization, and a dynamic Mini-Cart, all fully integrated and running smoothly on the WebSphere 6.0 platform.

Results: Best in breed Brand + Commerce

Launched in August 2008, the new direct-to-consumer TheNorthFace.com has enjoyed huge traffic increases, strong sales volume, and was selected by Internet Retailer as one of the Top 100 Online Retail Websites.