PVH Corp. accelerates content operations and eliminates downtime with Contentstack

PVH is one of the largest global lifestyle companies in the world and owns iconic brands Calvin Klein and TOMMY HILFIGER. As part of an overarching goal to modernize its infrastructure, the company recognized that it needed a new CMS in EMEA. 

The company had many goals in mind when researching the available CMS technologies on the market, including reducing technical debt that had accumulated over the years, and reforming content management operations by unifying the code base to make it easier to launch new features and updates. 

“We wanted to make the experience for content editors more fluid, and quicker,” Rocco Romano, Product Owner, Content Management, PVH said. “The right solution would enable a faster, easier, overall stronger operation for content updates.” 

To meet these challenges, and as part of an overhaul of its entire infrastructure, PVH chose Contentstack’s Composable DXP in EMEA. “Two main forces drove us to choose Contentstack,” Romano said. “It has a flatter structure in its file system that allows for more agility, and it was one of the fastest MACH-compliant SaaS tools that the market has to offer. We immediately saw how forward thinking that was. It was [also] so much easier to use than our previous composable CMS and other alternatives.”

After deploying Contentstack, the company has seen benefits for both content production and development teams. “In our previous CMS, everything was nested which meant you had to open a lot of tabs to make changes,” Romano said. “In Contentstack, everything is in the same view, it’s an endless scroll - it’s so much faster, more convenient and makes us a more agile team.” 

Editors enjoy using Publish Queue to schedule publications ahead of time and follow the completion state in real-time. As a sign of how successful the migration has been, the brands’ marketing strategies have been able to increase content volumes by 30-35%, and teams have been able to meet this increased demand without adding resources.

Front-end developers have also seen an increase in productivity since onboarding the Contentstack platform. “They are loving the way that new fields can be created by everybody on the go,” Romano said. “This is one thing that was really a tremendous step forward because updates can be done in a matter of seconds.” 

With Contentstack, PVH experiences no downtime, and has been able to introduce a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline with no disruption to business continuity. 

Contentstack data is also used to augment business analytics. PVH’s data strategy relies on real-time data streams using Apache Kafka, and one of those critical streams of data comes from the Contentstack platform. “The real-time customer activation team is able to seek emerging patterns in a plethora of aggregated data, including Contentstack,” Romano said. “Contentstack and Kafka were very easy to integrate, and our decision to go with Contentstack made it easy for us to do this important integration in just one stream. Kudos to Contentstack on that!”

PVH has leveraged Contentstack in EMEA as a critical element of its infrastructure in its journey to modernization. 

PVH’s key wins with Contentstack: 

• 60 localized websites supported: PVH takes advantage of Contentstack’s out-of-the-box localization tooling to support TOMMY HILFIGER across 29 languages and locales, and Calvin Klein
• Zero downtime: In contrast to previously compounding technical debt, PVH has now implemented CI/CD pipelines for continuous releases, and regularly updates content and features with no disruption.
• 35% increase in content production: Without increasing the number of content editors, marketing teams have been able to scale production easily to meet aggressive growth targets.