Greg Schaller of Perficient and Gretchen Crockford of Carhartt discussed how Carhartt successfully implemented B2C on the IBM iSeries. Carhartt is a 126-year old work wear company. Carhartt now has 17 new company owned stores, but also sales through retailers and their IBM Commerce 
website.
Running on iSeries is not something you hear a lot about, but this allowed Carhartt to leverage the capabilities and systems they already had running on the iSeries. Carhartt’s website vision is to “provide a best in-class personalized online experience for hard working consumers to learn about and by Carhartt. ”
They wanted to take advantage of ESite Model, responsive design for mobile users and empower marketing to manage the site. They also wanted to use Page Composer templates to improve business content. The new WebSphere Commerce platform gave IT new infrastructure that
included new source code control, build and deployment processes, true staging and production environments, high availability and redundancy.
Gretchen seemed clearly happy with the commerce site they have built.
Greg showed the complexity of the integrations that Carhartt needed for the solution. I counted over 17 different systems that were integrated into the commerce site. These systems included ExactTarget, Tealium, Limelight, BazzarVoice, SAP, Adobe Site Catalyst, Needle, CyberSource and Chase Paymentech, UPS, FedEx, Olapic, and more.
Challenges included:
- iSeries platform is different than Linux and AIX and the team had to learn to do things the iSeries way rather than rely on how implementations are done traditionally in Linux.
- Responsive Design – having access to all the various devices to test
- Page Composer Customization learning curve
- Carhartt was an early adopter of Feature Pack 7, which helped IBM make Fixpack 8 really good.
Carhartt’s results included:
- Increase in conversion and AOV
- User Sat if trending up
- Business users lover that they can tell a story through the site.
- IT likes the ability deploy new code without downtime. Since Feb 5, the site has not been down except for applying IBM APARs.
Next steps include building sites specific for Canada and EMEA. They will also migrate a B2b site from another platform to commerce. For more information about Carhartt, please visit: http://www.carhartt.com
