Hatstore

A company with high ambitions

In just a decade, Hatstore has grown from a small business in Sweden to a global player in the headwear space. Over time, as the business grew, their e-commerce needs also became much more complex.

One of Hatstore’s biggest assets is their extensive catalog of products. What started as a small 10 m² warehouse (it all fit under a queen-sized bed!) has expanded into an offering of more than 17.000 exclusive and premium products.

To ensure the highest quality possible, Hatstore is in control of its entire chain of production — starting with a high-tech production powered by state-of-the-art machines in their Kalmar factory. Customers are also encouraged to let their creativity flow by designing and personalizing their products.

Complex site with great range of products

The large product database creates some interesting challenges when it comes to managing the site’s complex menu structure. It’s important to rely on UI and UX design, and a good Content Management System (CMS), to make sure users can find exactly what they need when navigating the storefront.

Another critical point is internationalization. Selling in different markets means managing content in different languages and handling multiple currencies.

Focus on page speed and page size

To compete in the global ecommerce sector, in addition to a great business vision, Hatstore needs to ensure a smooth and fast experience for users anywhere in the world. According to research [1], if a page takes more than 4 seconds to load, users are likely to abandon the site and never return — making the page loading time one of the most important metrics for ecommerce websites [2].

This becomes even more relevant when talking about mobile site visitors: as page load time goes from 1 to 10 seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 123% [1]. Given that over 73% of all retail sales worldwide are now generated via mobile devices [3], a slow page load time directly correlates to a significant loss of sales.

Since optimizing users’ internet connection speeds is out of reach, Hatstore chose to focus on web development best practices: reducing page loading times and page sizes.

This is where Hyperlab comes in. Our flagship ecommerce framework Crown and our team of developers provided just the right balance between performance and flexibility.

Backed by the latest front-end technology and cutting edge performance techniques, our developers managed to achieve near instant page loading times and greatly reduce page sizes, which was Hatstore’s biggest priority. Crown’s headless and scalable architecture also made it easy to integrate all of Hatstore’s external services — and now they can easily switch out and upgrade any of those systems as their business grows and their needs change.

Another facet in this overhaul included an improved CMS. Hatstore’s staff can now easily maintain and update the site, despite a complex menu structure and the site’s many different languages.

By closely working together and listening to our client’s needs, Hyperlab achieved a really optimal Time to Market: in only six months, Hatstore’s new global storefront was live and the sales were rolling in, with a measurable increase in the average order value.