Mattel reimagines customer experience to maximize engagement and drive higher conversions

Mattel had a number of goals in mind when they began considering a solution to transform their content operations  – they aimed to build innovative and intuitive digital experiences that drive more traffic to their websites, foster deeper engagement with their many brands and significantly improve the efficiency of their sites globally. 

However, Mattel was challenged by a rigid technology stack where back-end content and front-end experience were tied together, requiring significant resources to make even the most minor changes to these experiences. Additionally, content needed to be built from scratch every time a new idea was conceived, which meant a slow release cycle. 

Mattel recognized that they needed to move to a microservice-based architecture, which would support a smoother customer experience at the front end, as well as making content management simpler behind the scenes. 

After a thorough discovery process, Contentstack’s headless CMS was chosen to support all of Mattel’s website content. This included e-commerce websites americangirl.com, shop.mattel.com,  Mattel creations and the experiences within these sites, as well as websites entirely outside of e-commerce, from play.mattel.com which provides kid-friendly games and experiences, to Mattel’s corporate website for communications. 

“With Contentstack, everything is microservice driven,” Mark Hall, Senior Director, Digital Technology, Mattel, said. “That means if we want to use React or Vue, we can change that framework without changing the content at the back end. This is really powerful for digital experiences like our American Girl doll configurator, which we rebuilt from scratch, offering customers the ability to build custom dolls on both web and mobile. As we get new molds or styles, we can manage that without any front-end changes whatsoever, which wasn’t possible before.”

The American Girl configurator allows users to get granular about their perfect doll, complete with freckles or glasses, a specific hairstyle, or apparel and accessories. Managed wholly through the CMS, all of these elements are image-based and require asset layering in an intelligent way so that users can watch their creation come to life. Using a smart Cloudinary integration, Mattel is able to map assets to the right publishing location within Contentstack. “This integration really helps with optimizing images within the web experience,” Hall said. “We can ensure we have a highly performant website based on what the user’s browser bandwidth is, so that we can return the right assets at the right time. The configurator has become our most successful product on AmericanGirl.com.”

Adopting headless technology also means that content is reusable for additional use cases, making it much faster to spin up new digital experiences. Mattel has a series of collectible Hot Wheels NFTs, where customers can see which NFTs they already own and what is available to them in a smart digital catalog. By employing reusable content blocks, Mattel was able to replicate this experience to quickly launch a brand-new UNO experience in partnership with the NFL, offering collectible NFL league UNO cards with a digital element where customers can view their cards in an online catalog. “This kind of experience keeps users coming back to the digital store time and time again, and because we had built something similar already we were able to spin it up in just four weeks, when previously it may have taken up to six months,” Hall said.

Mattel is now able to quickly design and launch digital experiences, and host experiences within experiences — such as the digital catalog for the new UNO/NFL partnership, or the digital element to their Escape Room in a Box, where instructions are found and followed online. 

Key wins for Mattel with Contentstack include:

• Increased conversion rates: With an optimized user experience, abandoned cart metrics have reduced and completion metrics have increased. Conversion rates are 4.9 higher on web, and 9.5x higher on mobile than they were previously.

• Faster website rendering: The American Girl doll experience now renders a lot quicker, even if users are working without a high bandwidth computer. The overall journey is now a lot faster and cleaner, leading to more completed experiences.

• Improved Lighthouse score: Mattel has seen a significant increase to its Chrome Lighthouse score, supporting users in completing their journey without frustration, and improving their SEO for an optimized Google ranking.