Gildan Launches BigCommerce B2B Wholesale Website for Its Six Printwear Brands

Gildan is one of the world’s largest vertically-integrated manufacturers of apparel, socks, and hosiery. The company owns a portfolio of brands sold in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, including Gildan, American Apparel, Comfort Colors, Anvil by Gildan, Alstyle, Prim + Preux, and more. After launching individual sites for a subset of its brands, Gildan looked to streamline its approach and create a single, full-service site to house its printwear brands and make it easy for customers to navigate through all the different products.

Having been in the eCommerce space for over 15 years, Gildan had been using legacy systems that worked, but were costly to maintain and missing certain capabilities. The company needed to expand its B2B eCommerce offering and be on a platform that would allow it to scale globally and better meet its long-term business goals. Moving to BigCommerce to handle its B2B needs, Gildan was able to find the right fit to create a much better customer experience and enjoy a lower total cost of ownership.

From comparing product styles across multiple brands to finding available inventory, the new Gildan Brands website on BigCommerce successfully delivers a better, more seamless way to access the Gildan family of brands all through one single platform.

Key Highlights

Replatform to BigCommerce

Instead of staying on a legacy system which was not only missing certain features but also costly to maintain, Gildan’s replatform over to BigCommerce allowed the company to create a better customer experience and continue to scale. With an API-first approach and ability to seamless integrate with other solutions, BigCommerce helped Gildan accomplish its goal to have one unified experience in a single back-end.

Product/Inventory Locator

Our team custom built a product locator for Gildan that would allow users to see real-time inventory of products and search by brand, style, color, distributor, and location. Users are able to view stock levels of distributors carrying selected styles with their respective sizes and colors. They can also identify which colors and sizes of products that are not currently offered or sold by certain distributors.

Mobile App

We worked with Gildan to build out its mobile app for IOS and Android which allows users to locate any style from the Gildan family of brands. The color swatch scanning feature lets customers find all available styles for a particular color through scanning one of Gildan’s swatch cards with the different fabrics and colors on their phone’s camera. Users can also locate inventory and stock levels, find recommendations of similar colors and styles, and get color codes.

Our Solution

The Silk team redesigned and replatformed Gildan’s site over to BigCommerce from its legacy system and established the necessary integrations with its PIM, ERP, and other required systems. With all its printwear brands consolidated into one site, customers can now search and find products across the various brands from one BigCommerce site.

Site features include the ability for customers to compare product styles from different brands against each other, including fabric content, fabric weight, fit, and other product attributes. Alternative style option recommendations are provided when selected options are out of stock, and customers can also easily find available inventory at different distributors. Our team custom built a product locator that would allow users to see real-time inventory and search by brand, style, color, distributor, and location.

We also worked with Gildan on its mobile app for IOS and Android, which includes a swatch scanning feature that allows customers to find available styles for a particular color through scanning one of Gildan’s swatch cards with the different fabrics and colors on their phone’s camera.

By launching its new B2B wholesale website on BigCommerce, Gildan can now achieve one unified experience on a single back-end. All of Gildan’s product information is stored in BigCommerce, which makes it easier for the Gildan team to maintain and manage their information and provide the same experience on both its website and mobile app.

Instead of staying on Gildan’s legacy system which was not only missing certain features but also costly to maintain, migrating them over to BigCommerce allowed them to create a better customer experience and continue to scale.

With the successful launch, Gildan’s new BigCommerce site now gives easier and more streamlined access to product information while providing an enhanced user experience for visitors. By consolidating all of Gildan’s apparel brands into a single, full-service platform, their customers can easily find and compare different product styles against each other and clearly see available inventory for each when choosing which products to order. Moving online also achieved Gildan’s goal towards becoming more sustainable and reducing their carbon footprint by moving away from paper catalogs.

The Silk team is continuing to support Gildan in pushing out new updates and features on its digital transformation journey including multi-language and other custom tools.

“Our experience working with Silk has been second to none in my 20+ years of working through replatform, site redesigns, and digital transformation. Quality of work is consistently excellent, great value for money, and a fantastic team at all levels (C class to UX/Dev) makes working with Silk a real pleasure. More importantly they are fast, agile, and flexible which is appreciated these days more than ever. We have found a long term BigCommerce partner in Silk, which has been instrumental in the success of our digital ambitions.”
– Raffael Sarracini, VP Global Ecommerce & IT, Gildan

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