With COVID-19 shutting down their retail stores, adidas Outdoor felt the pinch of the pandemic. Responsible for offering high-quality technical apparel and footwear for outdoor sports - adidas Outdoor depended on their in-store sales assistants to provide tailored advice to their customers.

Lockdown restricted team sports, but not individual sports, and customer demand for their products was growing. Suddenly the people who were always curious about mountain biking, hiking, or trail running had the time and desire to investigate it properly. And seasoned outdoor enthusiasts were venturing outdoors more than ever before.

This got the team thinking; 'how can we help our customers find the perfect outdoor product for their needs, without them needing to go into a shop?'

They needed a lightweight, mobile-first tool that would inform and inspire their customers - while refining their needs - leading them to personalised list of recommendations fast.

adidas Outdoor wanted their product finder to be completely user-centric, with a rich, visual quality that inspired as well as informed.

The agency started thinking about what customers were looking for when they were being helped by a sales assistant in-store. Information, yes, but also a human quality that doesn't translate as intuitively to the e-commerce environment. Language was key. The agency mapped out with the client the data the tool needed to query, and wrote questions relating to it in a conversational way. So the query to get to 'waterproof shoes' wasn't a static box to be checked, but the answer to the question, 'I want to be ready for....wet conditions', coupled with a looping video of a hiker in a stream.

This simple shift meant that the experience was dynamic - an entertaining way for people to refine their needs while discovering the breadth of product on offer.

In a fast-paced e-commerce environment, speed wins. The aim of the Product Finder is to guide the consumer to the perfect product in under 60 seconds.

Statistics show that the average time customers spend on an e-commerce site is 128 seconds. The information they're looking for needs to be instantly available, or they'll leave. They're also used to instantly engaging with visual mobile experiences like Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat, and spend most of the time online on their phones, so speed is crucial. The Product Finder targets customers between 18 and 25 years, in the growing sports of Mountain Biking, Trail Running and Hiking.

With the Product Finder becoming an integral part of the adidas app, we are catering to our customers need for their online journeys to demonstrate speed and precision, creating an intuitive, visually-driven tool that guides the customer to their perfect product in under 60 seconds.

Adidas worked with a trusted partner to bring the Product Finder to life. From concept to execution, it took just three months for the first MVP to be launched on their app with the Shoe finder. On 5 June 2020 the Product Finder was rolled out to 31,000 unique users on the adidas app in the UK and Germany. Located prominently as a banner in the 'Shoes' section of the app, customers were prompted to try the Shoe product finder before anything else.

Built with a modular approach, there are multiple opportunities to apply the tool across a variety of omnichannel platforms. It was adapted to be applied on retailer Zalando, and was activated recently on Runtastic and at the Infinitetrails running event.

Most impressive of all, the adidas Outdoor team started to see promising results immediately. 82% of people who started the journey completed it, and a low bounce rate of 25% validated the strength of the insight behind a visually-rich, CX-led tool that puts speed first. Incredibly, the conversion rate was 12.9% - well above average. The Product Finder has been rolled out to 31,000 unique users and is now being adopted to other product lines and partner retailers. This project was part of adidas' strategic focus on digital transformation, where in 2020 they exceeded their goal of achieving €4 billion in sales from their e-commerce platforms.

In the long term the belief is that the Product Finder will lower abandoned carts, increase conversion rates and result in fewer returns - this is the power of tailoring online personalisation with product discovery in a tool that prioritizes speed.