From brick-and-mortar to digital leaders: Running's transformation journey with Vaimo

The search function, powered by Klevu, is especially useful for mobile users. Customers can easily search and browse products and use the store selector to choose their nearest store.

Customers can filter by category, brand, price, and availability depending on the stock at their chosen store location. The filter function is important because of Runnings’ extensive catalog, which has many different categories, brands, models, and local inventory.

When customers choose a store in the store selector, the information provided is relevant to that store, including pricing, availability, promotions, and more. This goes for regular browsing and the search as well.

With 80 stores spread out over the U.S. and more opening, it’s critical to get an omnichannel customer journey just right. A majority of the customers use a combination of digital and physical touchpoints and the local store is a key part of both the pre-purchase planning phase and the purchase and delivery. The store selector serves as a vital element to seamlessly guide the customer through a fairly feature-rich and asynchronous journey. The store selector reflects the live inventory in the customer’s current store along with local promotions and pricing.

Much of the activity before, during, and after the purchase occurs in connection to the local store, and reflecting that digitally is important to Runnings.

Runnings has a complex pricing structure with a mix of online and offline price lists. In addition to this, the offline price lists are sometimes localized. A given product can have different prices across different stores, due to local competition and marketing strategies.

The price displayed online will depend on a number of factors, depending on whether the customer has selected a specific store. The Runnings website fully utilizes advanced price rules, and the logic is based on MAP/MSRP (minimum advertised price, manufacturer’s suggested retail price) using different price display logic, and more. The omnichannel pricing build was implemented as an extension of the native pricing framework.

Runnings uses every store as a fulfillment source and several options based on the native MSI feature were implemented to meet the business needs in this area. The logic for allocating inventory for orders is, again, running with a specific microservices build allowing it to run smoothly for large orders. Those shipments being critical due to the heavy internal replenishment costs being a key factor in the calculation, together with minimum quantity rules for every physical store.

With over 110,000 products and 2,200 product models ranging from clothing to gas and soil, Vaimo had to devise a way to manage the complex data structure. Vaimo used the Akeneo community edition to ensure the creative possibilities were endless and tailored the platform to Runnings’ needs.

Vaimo built Runnings’ specific capabilities with an array of Microservices, ensuring that the company’s website could handle every product configuration and setup effortlessly and efficiently. Vaimo also provides ongoing support for the Runnings PIM solution.