Building the World’s Fastest Apparel Storefront: Lessons in CX Transformation from the Front Lines of Retail Tech

As a digital transformation executive who has held senior roles at consumer brand companies including VF Corp, HanesBrands, and Newell Brands, I’ve had the opportunity to lead digital customer experience and technology innovation across dozens of iconic consumer brands. What follows are some of the most important lessons I’ve learned—and outcomes I’ve helped drive—while transforming digital commerce operations in the apparel, home, and consumer goods industries to meet modern consumer expectations.

Across these roles, the brief was similar: enhance the overall consumer experience. I believe a brand’s eCommerce site plays a pivotal role in the consumer journey—whether a transaction ultimately happens online, in-store, via a DTC channel, or through a retail partner. Enhanced site performance, deeper personalization, and scalable innovation can improve brand performance across all channels. These transformations aren’t just about platforms or pixels. They are about reshaping teams, processes, and priorities to deliver faster, smarter, and more human experiences.

Agility as a Foundation for CX Excellence

In multiple organizations, I’ve seen transformation anchored in scaled agile delivery. Rather than organizing work around channels or functions, I prefer to structure teams around consumer intent—helping customers find it, buy it, get it, and helping the brand know me (i.e., understand the consumer). These journey-based pods are cross-functional by design—pairing product owners with developers, QA, analytics, and UX—all supported by shared services for platform stability and data analysis.

At multiple companies I have seen this approach reduce delivery friction, accelerate innovation, and keep the customer journey at the center of how we worked.

Elevating UX from Supporting Actor to Strategic Lead

One of the most consistently valuable investments I’ve seen is in UX and UI capability. At both VF Corp and HanesBrands we brought in senior talent with an agency background to lead and mentor the in-house team. The goal was to make UX a competitive advantage—not just a supporting function.

This meant embedding user testing and A/B experimentation into the regular cadence of product development. Tools like ContentSquare and Noibu can give teams real-time visibility into friction points, hidden bugs, and behavioral anomalies—allowing designers and product managers to make faster, smarter decisions based on actual usage, not assumptions.

Building this capability in-house enables a shift from outsourced redesigns to in-house creative and UX ownership—enabling faster refresh cycles, improved design fidelity, and tighter feedback loops with teams who are closer to both the data and the brand.

From Stability to Personalization at Scale

Personalization adds complexity to any digital commerce stack. Before you can personalize, you have to stabilize. At HanesBrands we focused first on improving architecture, infrastructure, and uptime—essential groundwork that enabled everything else. This resulted in Champion.com achieving 100% planned uptime across a full calendar year—a major milestone for a high-volume apparel site.

From that foundation, we built a modern personalization engine using Adobe Experience Platform, including CDP, Target, and Analytics. Our strategy was grounded in four principles:

• Customer journey–driven
• Aligned to measurable business outcomes
• Test-and-learn based
• Rooted in data-informed personas

Successful consumer brands now engage across a vast and growing range of digital and social channels, each with its own content demands. Add personalization at scale, and it becomes nearly impossible to produce enough high-quality content with traditional workflows.

The solution is to build a content supply chain—akin to a physical goods supply chain. At Newell Brands, I helped lead a major initiative integrating modern workflow and collaboration tools with best-in-class creative platforms and digital asset management, all supercharged by generative AI. Unlocking creative content production is now a critical component of modern marketing.

Speed as Strategy: Edge Delivery in Action

Site speed is a competitive lever—technically, commercially, and experientially. During my time at HanesBrands, we collaborated with Adobe to help pioneer their highly innovative Edge Delivery Services architecture for eCommerce. This culminated in the successful launches of Maidenform.com and Hanes.com on the new framework.

The results of that shift have been publicly shared by HanesBrands, and they speak for themselves:

• Lighthouse scores—a Google benchmark for site performance—jumped from the 20s to 95–100; an extraordinary score for commerce sites
• Page load times became virtually instant, even on mobile
• Bounce rates dropped by 40%
• Organic traffic from unbranded search terms like “t-shirt bra” increased by up to 1000%

These weren’t just technical wins. They had direct commercial impact: stronger SEO, higher engagement, and better conversion. In short, speed became a CX differentiator—and a brand enabler.

Building a Culture Where Innovation Can Thrive

Technology is only as good as the team behind it. What I’ve seen work best is when cross-functional agile pods are empowered not just to deliver, but to experiment, iterate, and learn. That requires not just process, but culture.

At HanesBrands, we worked to foster a culture that celebrated wins but didn’t punish thoughtful failures. Some of the most impactful ideas emerged from team-led initiatives—not top-down mandates. We gave teams the space to try new ideas, and the support to learn when things didn’t go to plan.

Looking back, one of the most rewarding outcomes wasn’t just the tech uplift—it was the esprit de corps that developed. When teams feel ownership, agency, and trust, they work together to drive faster delivery and innovation.

What I’ve Learned

Across brands and business models, a few consistent truths have emerged for me:

1. Speed wins. Whether it’s technical performance or time to market, being fast keeps you ahead of the competition.
2. UX is a growth lever. Invest in leadership, tools, and team maturity—it pays dividends in consumer outcomes.
3. Agility is more than a framework. When teams are organized around the customer journey and given space to test, learn, and sometimes fail, they create compounding impact.

Final Thoughts

The most exciting transformations I’ve been part of didn’t come from a single product launch or technology bet. They came from sustained, aligned execution across people, process, and platforms, with a deep commitment to the customer.

The work I contributed to shows that legacy brands can become digital leaders with the right mindset, the right teams, and the right priorities.

Let’s keep raising the bar for what great commerce experiences can be.