Today’s retail industry is experiencing a tectonic shift, not only in the way people
shop for and purchase products but also in the types of experiences they expect
retailers to provide. As merchants drive to adapt their businesses to the digital
age, omni-channel retailing is a key initiative that the industry believes is a path
to success.
But what exactly does omni-channel mean, and why is it so important? Put simply,
omni-channel retailing involves providing a seamless experience across all physical
stores and online channels. And it’s important because neither brick-and-mortar
outposts nor e-commerce sites alone suffice for any but the most modest retail
operations these days.
Indeed, with online apparel sales—the most popular e-commerce category in
the United States—expected to increase 20% between 2016 and 2020, companies
such as popular clothing designer and retailer American Eagle Outfitters (AEO)
are working hard to make the most of their digital assets. For AEO that means
linking its physical AEO and Aerie stores with its e-commerce operations through
shrewd digital marketing and top-performing websites and mobile apps. In other
words, omni-channel retailing.
AEO rapidly iterates on its development of online and in-store solutions, and their
convergence in a seamless shopping experience. Experimentation in production
generates data sets that inform changes and refinements. AEO’s “reserve-try-buy”
program that lets customers reserve items through its mobile app for later try-on
at the store is a good example of omni-channel enablement. But this seamlessness
can be for naught if there’s a glitch in the technology enabling it.
American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers
INDUSTRYRetail
LOCATIONPittsburgh, Pa.
EMPLOYEES39,000
PRODUCTSNew Relic APM, New Relic Insights,
New Relic Mobile, New Relic Browser,
and New Relic Synthetics
WHY NEW RELICOptimize performance and improve
customer experience for e-commerce
website and mobile app
RESULTS• Delivers real-time visibility into
performance of e-commerce
website and mobile app
• Offers reporting capabilities for
seamless communication across all
business teams, including executive
management
• Facilitates anytime/anywhere issue
resolution with mobile capabilities
• Provides performance baselines that
will enable retailer to gauge success
of development efforts and plans for
cloud migration
Customer Case Study
Determined to ensure that all customers experience a seamless, high-performance,
and effective shopping experience irrespective of channel, AEO turned to New Relic
to monitor and collect insights into its infrastructure and e-commerce systems.
Creating a culture of constant improvementFounded in 1977 by brothers Jerry and Mark Silverman, AEO started life as a single
store in a mall in Novi, Michigan. Today, the company that sells casual clothes
targeted primarily at teens and young adults operates more than 1,000 stores and
employs nearly 40,000 associates worldwide.
When Colin Bodell joined the retailer as chief technology officer in 2016, the com-
pany had already begun to execute its omni-channel retail strategy. Bodell’s job was
to ensure that AEO’s technology could support and accelerate that strategy. Bodell
describes his priorities as follows: “My number one priority is security; number two is
availability; and number three is latency. If you’re not secure, there’s no point running
a website because you’re going to get compromised. If you are secure, you better be
available 24/7. And if you’re available 24/7, you better be fast. It’s as simple as that.”
But while these priorities may sound straightforward, ensuring
all that speed and latency is anything but—which is why Bodell
immediately broached the topic of getting New Relic mon-
itoring solutions up and running at AEO. To his delight, Bodell
found out that they already were—now it would just be a matter
of maximizing their use.
Rewind to several years prior, and AEO was just getting started
on its New Relic journey. Explains Matt Kundrat, production
support manager for digital technology at AEO, “When I joined
American Eagle five years ago, New Relic APM had been de-
ployed to monitor Ruby (for our Favorites application). But only
one engineer used it, and he had left, so at that point it was
truly shelfware. When our San Francisco office began work on a
mobile app, that team deployed New Relic Mobile to monitor it.
At that point, I decided to really get New Relic APM going again.”
Knowing that New Relic adoption would depend on AEO
staff understanding what they could achieve with the mon-
itoring tools, Kundrat worked closely with New Relic to set up
lunch-and-learn sessions, Q&As, and more to help get New
Relic monitoring ingrained in the company’s culture.
New Relic provided us with the visibility we needed to detect and remedy what could have been a significant issue on our busiest day of the year. It was this success that led our leadership to fully embrace New Relic, and that launched us on the monitoring journey we continue today.
Matt KundratProduction Support Manager for Digital Technology, American Eagle Outfitters
American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers
And it worked. Says Kundrat, “More and more people began using New Relic APM—
especially my own team for support and monitoring—and we ended up getting a
much better view of site performance. So, we merged the two New Relic accounts,
got rid of another performance monitoring tool, and eventually added New Relic
Browser and New Relic Synthetics to the mix as well.”
The icing on the cake came a few years later when AEO was able to add New Relic
Insights, gaining the ability to collect event and metric data from across the New Relic
Digital Intelligence Platform in real time, and then organize, query, and visualize that
data to answer key questions about application performance and customer experience.
Saving the biggest e-commerce day of the yearThose real-time insights came to AEO’s rescue on Cyber Monday in 2016, when
some of the company’s Java virtual servers began to die. Not only was Bodell’s team
able to spot and diagnose the problem swiftly using their New Relic dashboards, they
were able to provide minute-to-minute updates on their progress toward resolving
the problem. The results were impressive.
Explains Bodell, “If I hadn’t had those New Relic tools in front
of me—allowing me to provide the play-by-play to our internal
business partners—every executive in the company would have
been on the phone to Matt. And Matt would have been spend-
ing all his time fielding questions rather than doing his job.”
As it was, an engineer was able to make a configuration change
that quickly resolved the issue, and the hour that followed be-
came the largest digital hour in AEO’s history—a fact not lost on
the company’s leadership. Explains Kundrat, “New Relic provid-
ed us with the visibility we needed to detect and remedy what
could have been a significant issue on our busiest day of the
year. It was this success that led our leadership to fully embrace
New Relic, and that launched us on the monitoring journey we
continue today.”
Data-driven omniscienceFor Bodell, that monitoring journey begins on the giant TV
screen in his office, which plays just one show—New Relic—
round-the-clock. Featuring a custom dashboard that Bodell
Because I’m always looking at my New Relic Insights dashboard—whether it’s on the big screen in my office or in the corner of my screen during a meeting—I can keep my finger on the pulse of the business and ask my team highly contextual and data-driven questions.
Colin BodellChief Technology Officer, American Eagle Outfitters
American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers
© Copyright 2017, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 08.2017
himself created, the screen projects a variety of data he considers important,
including Apdex scores (to gauge user experience) and minute-by-minute traffic
displayed side-by-side with order rate, server load, and much more.
“Because I’m always looking at my New Relic Insights dashboard—whether it’s on
the big screen in my office or in the corner of my screen during a meeting—I can
keep my finger on the pulse of the business and ask my team highly contextual
and data-driven questions,” he says.
Bodell’s New Relic dashboard gets everyone invested in the quest for continuous
improvement. “That monitor serves as a constant reminder of how important latency
and performance are,” he says. “People are seeing minute-to-minute feedback, and
it helps them understand that anything they develop must improve those numbers.
If something they’re working on makes those numbers go down, they need to stop,
rethink, and try again.”
On-the-go monitoringKundrat and team are especially appreciative of the management-from-any-device
capabilities conveyed by the New Relic solutions. Kundrat, in fact, made good use
of them at New Relic’s own FutureStack conference in 2015, when during the keynote
he received an alert indicating that the system’s token management layer was spiking.
“I texted my lead engineer to take a look at the problem,” Kundrat says. “It turned
out that one of our three servers was not having traffic distributed to it in the
same way as the others. As a result, memory spiked and the server went down. By
the end of the keynote, I had solved the issue using the alert from New Relic and
the mobile experience.”
A baseline for savings and innovationNew Relic monitoring is also central to AEO’s efforts to keep costs low and per-
formance high for an environment that’s in constant flux. Says Bodell, “We’re con-
stantly evaluating technology solutions. The performance baseline we’re able to
capture with New Relic allows us to see not only how new products and services
are performing, but also how they’re using storage and compute capacity—both of
which are vitally important.”
That baseline will also help AEO migrate key systems to the cloud. Explains Bodell,
“As we move systems from on premise to a public-cloud fabric, New Relic will be
able to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of how specific services are per-
forming within both environments, which will be incredibly valuable.”
American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers