PUMA Moves Faster with Cloudinary

With €8.5 billion in sales (2022), PUMA is one of the world’s largest and best-known sporting goods brands. A few years ago, the company embarked on its MACH journey to replatform to a headless, composable React-based web development environment. This laid the groundwork for a pivot to a full composable architecture. Partnering with global design and engineering consultancy Formidable, now Nearform_Commerce, PUMA’s new composable architecture now comprises Sanity.io, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Next.js, Google Cloud, and Cloudinary — a fully integrated tech stack that’s providing tremendous value. Moving faster and more efficiently, PUMA has started to drive more operational ROI by boosting day-to-day team productivity. And getting the most value from their images and videos is putting Cloudinary at the heart of their composable tech stack.

ABOUT

Speeding Up the World’s Already Super-Fast Athletes

PUMA is one of the world’s leading sports brands designing, developing, selling, and marketing footwear, apparel, and accessories. For 75 years, PUMA has relentlessly pushed sports and culture forward by creating fast products for the world’s fastest athletes. PUMA offers performance and sports-inspired lifestyle products in categories such as soccer, running and training, basketball, golf, and motorsports. It collaborates with renowned designers and brands to bring sports influences into street culture and fashion. The PUMA Group owns the brands PUMA, Cobra Golf, and stichd, distributes its products in more than 120 countries, employs more than 20,000 people worldwide, and is headquartered in Bavaria, Germany.

THE CHALLENGE

A Pivot to Productivity

Since joining PUMA just over three years ago, former Airline Sector Digital Product Manager Bettina Dönmez has made lots of positive productivity changes. Cloudinary’s AI-Powered Image and Video Technology Platform acts as the single source of truth for all the visual assets across their tech stack as well as for some older platforms. 

“By moving to composable, we are ready for tomorrow’s ecommerce business challenges and able to start benefiting from a flexible, modern ecosystem. And by saving so much time on implementation, our time is freed up to give the best possible service to our customers,” confirms Dönmez.

The challenge now: integrate these new tools and start using the power of composable architecture to improve productivity and deliver against page load speed KPIs. As Dönmez says, “For us right now it’s all about cost control, and the need to do more with a lot less than we had when we were in our major digital transformation period.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

The Awesomeness of g_auto

In practical terms, that mission boils down to harnessing Cloudinary’s power — not only to benefit PUMA’s new and best-in-class shopping app, but also for older platforms and online stores. That results into maximized total cost of ownership with Cloudinary’s flexibility to work with legacy systems yet also grows with PUMA as they continue to modernize in phases.

Key to this is making full use, day-to-day, with all that Cloudinary offers in terms of image and video optimization, automation and delivery. “We can’t get enough of all the asset optimization ‘goodies’ Cloudinary offers,” Dönmez enthuses. “We can now make sure every image fits any size device display, automatically convert to AVIF format, easily change background colors and automatically set the 100% best quality for any PUMA image.”

A key early discovery around transformation presets that has unlocked huge productivity is smart cropping. Here, the platform’s intelligent gravity selection capability, which ensures that the most interesting areas of each image get selected as the main focus for the requested crop, is top of Bettina’s list. 

“I can’t get over how amazing g_auto is!” she says. “if you don’t know anything about Cloudinary, you need to start there as it saves you so much time!”

THE RESULTS

AVIF Accelerates Page Load Speed by 71%

Dönmez and her team are easily able to process the 10 million visual assets PUMA’s websites and mobile offerings depend on, which update every five minutes. All of internal photography source systems are now automatically piped into the new image and video platform, a 20-terabyte resource that delivers her team an enviable uptime rate of 99.95%, is built on Cloudinary Programmable Media management, transformation, optimization and delivery APIs.

Another benefit of moving to Cloudinary is easy integration between PUMA’s new Sanity CMS and Salesforce Commerce Cloud through Cloudinary plugins (especially the Media Library Widget), which make it easy to integrate with the rest of the new PUMA headless stack. The aim is to bring more image data from legacy tools into Cloudinary as the single source of truth to serve consumer touchpoints.

Shaping the internal mindset doesn’t stop at platform level but extends to promoting the original, high-resolution image file as the source of truth. “We think about cropping when we think about sizing image files,” she shares. “Within our composable stack, we can use the auto-resize options which creates derivatives of the original, rather than a smaller sized copy. Thinking in originals and derivatives will require some time to adjust to, but for cost control and asset performance analytics this mindset shift is crucial.”

The good news is that PUMA still has a lot of headroom for achieving even more efficiency with Cloudinary as they continue to consolidate and modernize their systems globally. “Cloudinary has a lot to offer and people are already seeing it could be a replacement for a number of things. We still have, to some extent, siloed teams here, but we will start seeing cost savings at scale when teams begin to work together more seamlessly. If we use Cloudinary to consolidate our DAMs further and manage all of our images globally, we’ll save a lot more money.”