CASE STUDY | NATIONAL RETAIL ASSOCIATION

Transforming the Digital Experience for The National Retail Federation

SERVICES

→ Platform Strategy

→ Platform Evaluations

→ Strategic Vision

→ Roadmapping

→ UX/Design

→ Headless CMS Implementation

It’s a cold January evening in NYC and a team of retail industry executives are meeting with RDA on the first night of The National Retail Federation's Big Show, the largest retail industry event in the country. Just a few months earlier, NRF began a partner search to evolve their digital presence and better serve their members and stakeholders. Having selected RDA, The Big Show event provided the perfect opportunity to embark on this critical transformation journey together.

The Opportunity

In an increasingly competitive retail landscape, the National Retail Federation (NRF) recognized the need to modernize their digital experiences and address their critical pain points. An outdated content management system (CMS), the need for improved content personalization, and the need for more speed and flexibility were just some of the issues they wanted to address. RDA was brought in to help the NRF team evaluate their digital options, design the future vision for NRF's experiences, and create and implement a comprehensive roadmap to elevate NRF's online platform, ensuring it remains a vital resource for the retail community.

Key elements of NRF’s goals included:

Improving audience journeys from awareness to conversion, especially around events
Improving navigation and content discovery through search
Personalizing content for users at specific points in their journey's
Improving time-to-market speeds for content creation.
Improving data capture
Creating more UX and design flexibility for pages and event sites
Fast, reliable, and secure hosting environment

Reduced Dev Time

70 %

Reduced Custom Code

80 %

Lighthouse Scores

100 %

NRF’s Vision

NRF's vision for change was to create a unified and omnichannel digital experience for the diverse audiences within the retail industry across all of NRF's sites and events, with a robust and extensible platform to create and centralize content, the flexibility and speed to create content at scale, and the ability to share components and brand assets while also keeping content fresh for each year's events.

Replatforming to Storyblok

RDA conducted a series of in-depth workshops with NRF's team to identify key challenges and opportunities. Through collaborative discussions, the team uncovered significant limitations posed by NRF’s outdated CMS, which lacked the flexibility necessary for agile content updates and robust user experiences. Recognizing the need for a more dynamic solution, RDA meticulously evaluated various headless CMS platforms, ultimately recommending and implementing Storyblok as the ideal replacement to enhance user engagement and streamline NRF’s digital operations.

Advanced search capabilities with Algolia

In addition to the CMS transition, RDA's strategy team envisioned a future where NRF could leverage advanced search capabilities. By integrating Algolia, NRF could provide a seamless search experience, enabling users to find relevant content and resources quickly.

Reimagined navigation, UX, and design

A comprehensive audit of NRF's information architecture, components and content blocks informed a new approach to the user experience and design for NRF's digital presence. RDA refined the navigation reorganizing and simplifying titles and taxonomy and created a comprehensive design system and component library easily themed for each of NRF's corporate, educational, and event websites.

Fast & secure website hosting with Netlify

RDA and NRF partnered with Netlify to deliver a high-performance global cloud-edge network for NRF’s websites. With guaranteed uptime and proactive security measures, Netlify ensures continuous site availability and protection against potential threats. Additionally, the platform offers industry-leading tools that empower developers, as well as NRF’s technical and marketing teams, with seamless access to a robust, scalable hosting environment.

More to come!

NRF and RDA are currently exploring the potential for personalized content delivery, ensuring that NRF could tailor its offerings to meet its diverse audience's specific needs and interests with robust custom experiences. Additionally, the strategic roadmap identified the need for CDP and DAM platform evaluations and implementations.

"Headless architecture has been a pivotal shift for NRF, empowering our content teams and enabling us to deliver exceptional digital experiences to our members and the retail community at large. We are excited about the future as we continue to leverage capabilities that drive innovation and growth.”

Jason Hoolsema Chief Information Officer - NRF

Learn more on The Retail Podcast

NRF’s CIO, Jason Hoolsema discusses how the retail giant embraced innovation to transform its digital presence.