Sanita is a legacy Danish clog brand with deep adoption in the service industry, where working on your feet is the norm and all-day comfort is a priority. We had the great pleasure of working with the U.S. distributor to build a new and wholly American experience.
When Sanita chose one of Maine’s most established shoe importers as their new U.S. distributor, we faced both a challenge and an opportunity to create a custom ecommerce experience for this legacy brand.
The biggest challenge in the Sanita project was the customer journey and how to balance a substantial catalog with different shopper personas. Our solution involved extensive customer research and concluded with a parallel category approach, allowing users to shop by feature, style, and use. This allowed us to tailor industry-specific information and imagery to create more personalized experiences for Sanita’s many customer groups.
Additionally, we were able to build complex product feature data models based on product tags, creating information-rich Product Detail Pages (PDPs) without the need for manual data entry.
We successfully tailored Sanita's ecommerce experience to meet the diverse needs of their customer base. This resulted in more personalized shopping experiences, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and engagement with the brand.
Their timeline management and collaborative approach are impressive. The site led to an immediate increase in profitable direct-to-consumer sales.
M. Leonard — Sanita US Distributor
Wholesale hides the customer.
Sanita had decades of adoption among people who stand up all day — nurses, chefs, stylists — but the brand had reached almost all of them through retailers. Going direct meant meeting a customer the business had never had to describe, across a catalog broad enough that two shoppers arriving for the same reason still needed entirely different paths through it.
That is a research problem before it is a design problem. The work started with the personas actually buying clogs and the journey each of them takes, then built the store around those journeys rather than around the catalog's own structure. A chef and a hospital nurse are both buying for eight hours on hard floors, and they will not respond to the same page.
The store was profitable on direct sales from launch, which for a wholesale brand's first attempt at DTC is unusual. The ordinary outcome is a year of learning paid for out of margin.
Legacy brands moving direct tend to budget for the site and not for the question underneath it. Knowing precisely who is buying, and why, is the part that decides whether the channel pays.
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