One of the best customer acquisition tools for Helzberg is having efficient and organized backend systems for its product assets, Jackie Arlotti, Divisional Vice President, Ecommerce Operations and Planning at Helzberg told attendees at the Salesforce Connections Conference in Chicago in June.

Helzberg’s online sales increased 25% after updating is tech stack, including using a product information management system and a digital asset management system from Bynder.

The jewelry retailer with 160 North American stores was late to building out its online store, assuming consumers wouldn’t want to purchase a $5,000 engagement ring online. But the pandemic woke the brand up to the fact that, if the online customer experience was good, shoppers would in fact buy a highly considered purchase online, Arolitti said.

The brand had a Salesforce ecommerce platform, but it was not seeing the conversion nor the growth it wanted to.

Helzberg Accelerates The Product’s Time To Site

One of Helzberg’s largest pain points was getting product to the site quickly. It would take the brand weeks, with lots of manual effort and planning meetings to prioritize products to add new merchandise, Arolitti said. For key selling periods like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, there were negotiations and forecasts about which product might sell the most or earliest, which also had to align with when Helzberg received the inventory.

“When trying to get thousands of products to site for a seasonal launch, you are getting all hands on deck,” Arolitti said.

The marketing team often had to wrangle product images from merchants and external partners. The assets would come in without a standardized taxonomy and the marketing team did not have a single repository for this content.

After integrating the new system, Helzberg can quickly add new products to its site and it actually runs ahead of schedule, she said. The platform houses 100,000-plus assets, 12,000 products and 180 users within Helzberg.

One of the largest benefits to the new system, is that the retailer no longer needs a large number of employees to upload assets, she said. Now each asset has one central master asset in the form of a URL. That means every time the website or a marketing campaign uses an image, they are all calling on the same URL, which means it is optimized for the format and the load time is fast, she said.

Now, close to 20% of Helzberg’s customers purchase online, compared with stores generating 95% of revenue before the retailer’s digital transformation.

Bridal Category Grows 45% Year Over Year

After updating its tech stack, engagement rings is now one of Helzberg’s leading online categories. It typically takes a consumer six to eight months to purchase an engagement ring, Arolitti said.

Helzberg updated its imagery to better showcase the ring’s dimension. When consumers are shopping for this product online, it’s important for them to see the same image over and over again across its website and marketing materials, Arolitti said. This new system ensures that and the proof is in the category growth. Bridal category sales grew 43% year over year and is now 25% of Helzberg’s online revenue, Arolitti said.

“We are in our third year of digital growth since we began this journey in ecommerce,” Arlotti said.

Multinational conglomerate company Berkshire Hathaway acquired Helzberg in 1995 and it operates as a wholly owned subsidiary.