Neiman Marcus Reduces Photoshoot-to-Web by 50%

In 2016 Neiman Marcus partnered with Cloudinary to transform its international online business using Cloudinary’s image optimization tools. Over the years Cloudinary has provided ongoing support of the retailer’s e-commerce efforts by automating and enhancing its massive image and video library. When Neiman Marcus decided to implement a mobile-first strategy, they turned to Cloudinary. And, when the time came to abandon their legacy systems and migrate to a new image and video platform, the choice was obvious.

ABOUT

Digital Leader in Luxury

Historic fashion and specialty retailer, Neiman Marcus, opened its first store in Dallas, Texas in 1907, then rapidly grew to become one of the first luxury department store chains in the South. Today, the brand manages more than 5.1 million gross square feet of retail store space in the U.S., including 37 Neiman Marcus stores, two Bergdorf Goodman locations, and five Last Call stores.

The retailer’s website is another revenue generator attracting an international audience. With more than 18 million assets under management, Neiman Marcus delivers a beautifully designed website and mobile image- and video-driven experience as elegant and accessible as its stores.

More than a century later, the company continues to be one of the leading retailers of designer clothing, shoes, jewelry, beauty products, gifts, home goods, and more with a revenue of $4.9 billion annually.

THE CHALLENGE

Migrating From a Legacy System That Couldn’t Scale

Before migrating to Cloudinary, Neiman Marcus had been using legacy rich-media systems and a homegrown solution to deliver its digital experiences. This outdated system consumed work hours and required a tremendous amount of repetitive, manual work. The move to Cloudinary’s composable infrastructure modernized their digital experiences and dramatically improved speed and delivery of those experiences. The switch to a new image and video platform was a painless experience. Sri Kalavacharla, Sr. Director, Omni Personalization and Engagement Engineering says Cloudinary made it “…an easy journey for us.”

Cloudinary simplified the migration process by guiding budget, migration schedules, and considerations around metadata enhancements, identifying and deleting outdated assets, mapping existing workflows to Cloudinary features, and much more.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Achieving Scale by Putting Cloudinary at Its Core

To take advantage of Cloudinary’s AI-powered image asset management capabilities, Neiman Marcus placed it at the core of its digital experience transformation.

The Neiman Marcus digital team assessed which of their partners worked best alongside Cloudinary, such as several AWS services and Cloudinary tapped partners specifically compatible with Cloudinary, namely Contentful as its content management system (CMS).

“Cloudinary is not just a DAM. What you’re getting is Cloudinary plus a content delivery network that helps you deliver better-performing assets,” adds Kalavacharla.

With Cloudinary at the center of their content strategy, Neiman Marcus focused on improving content velocity by streamlining the photoshoot-to-web workflow which was unachievable with their legacy system. After upgrading to Cloudinary and utilizing the AI-powered image editing and optimization capabilities, designers no longer spend their time on manual tasks. Neiman Marcus reduced their time-to-site by 50% — a four to two-week reduction.

Neiman Marcus now leverages capabilities beyond organizing and storing images. Cloudinary auto-generates millions of product images to run at different sizes for various digital content fields and automatically formats, sizes, and scales images and video to be viewed at the highest level of quality available.

THE RESULTS

Higher-Quality Images and Faster Performance

Typically, delivering higher-quality images with larger file sizes negatively impacts web performance. Aware of this Kalavacharla and the Neiman Marcus team carefully monitored performance metrics and Core Web Vitals and were pleased to see that web performance and Google Core Web Vitals have improved.

Kalavacharla states companies can no longer create a website and be OK with it running at dial-up speed. Data shows that a one-second delay can cause a 20% drop in traffic. Consumers need images to load quickly and mobile-first. Cloudinary ensures the images are optimally delivered wherever consumers are shopping, regardless of device, format, or bandwidth. The team at Neiman Marcus can now use that time to focus on building a more dynamic, differentiated, modern experience for their shoppers.