As one of the world’s leading sports brands, PUMA operates in a lot of different geographies and markets. But with it has come a lot of different technologies and systems and a model that didn’t put digital at the heart of its operations. Time to market was slow, there were a lot of software issues, and initiatives sometimes just couldn’t get off the ground.

The aim was to switch that all around. Digital had to come first, especially with D2C channels coming to the fore, speed and performance had to be high with PUMA wanting to be the fastest sports site in the world, and technology had to change in order to deliver.

Dylan Valade, Head of Global Ecommerce Technology at PUMA joined Rory Dennis to discuss PUMA’s digital transformation, including how speed becomes a key priority, how they moulded technology to fit the team and business needs, and how collaboration and knowledge exchange has increased across teams as a result of the changes.

Key highlights:

• For PUMA the strategy is to buy over build, as it means they don’t waste time building from scratch and instead use that time to implement, test, and try.
• The goal for PUMA was to be the fastest sports site in the world, but they had to work with what they had and make incremental changes. But knowing speed and performance were within their control, they knew they could achieve financial gains on the back of it.
• They started by bringing all geographies onto one code base, which brought with it a whole new way of working, increased sharing of work, and knowledge exchange. As a result, people and systems got better, and rollouts became faster.