Today’s retail industry is experiencing a tectonic shift, not only in the way people

shop for and purchase products but also in the types of experiences they expect

retailers to provide. As merchants drive to adapt their businesses to the digital

age, omni-channel retailing is a key initiative that the industry believes is a path

to success.

But what exactly does omni-channel mean, and why is it so important? Put simply,

omni-channel retailing involves providing a seamless experience across all physical

stores and online channels. And it’s important because neither brick-and-mortar

outposts nor e-commerce sites alone suffice for any but the most modest retail

operations these days.

Indeed, with online apparel sales—the most popular e-commerce category in

the United States—expected to increase 20% between 2016 and 2020, companies

such as popular clothing designer and retailer American Eagle Outfitters (AEO)

are working hard to make the most of their digital assets. For AEO that means

linking its physical AEO and Aerie stores with its e-commerce operations through

shrewd digital marketing and top-performing websites and mobile apps. In other

words, omni-channel retailing.

AEO rapidly iterates on its development of online and in-store solutions, and their

convergence in a seamless shopping experience. Experimentation in production

generates data sets that inform changes and refinements. AEO’s “reserve-try-buy”

program that lets customers reserve items through its mobile app for later try-on

at the store is a good example of omni-channel enablement. But this seamlessness

can be for naught if there’s a glitch in the technology enabling it.

American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers

INDUSTRYRetail

LOCATIONPittsburgh, Pa.

EMPLOYEES39,000

PRODUCTSNew Relic APM, New Relic Insights,

New Relic Mobile, New Relic Browser,

and New Relic Synthetics

WHY NEW RELICOptimize performance and improve

customer experience for e-commerce

website and mobile app

RESULTS• Delivers real-time visibility into

performance of e-commerce

website and mobile app

• Offers reporting capabilities for

seamless communication across all

business teams, including executive

management

• Facilitates anytime/anywhere issue

resolution with mobile capabilities

• Provides performance baselines that

will enable retailer to gauge success

of development efforts and plans for

cloud migration

Customer Case Study

Determined to ensure that all customers experience a seamless, high-performance,

and effective shopping experience irrespective of channel, AEO turned to New Relic

to monitor and collect insights into its infrastructure and e-commerce systems.

Creating a culture of constant improvementFounded in 1977 by brothers Jerry and Mark Silverman, AEO started life as a single

store in a mall in Novi, Michigan. Today, the company that sells casual clothes

targeted primarily at teens and young adults operates more than 1,000 stores and

employs nearly 40,000 associates worldwide.

When Colin Bodell joined the retailer as chief technology officer in 2016, the com-

pany had already begun to execute its omni-channel retail strategy. Bodell’s job was

to ensure that AEO’s technology could support and accelerate that strategy. Bodell

describes his priorities as follows: “My number one priority is security; number two is

availability; and number three is latency. If you’re not secure, there’s no point running

a website because you’re going to get compromised. If you are secure, you better be

available 24/7. And if you’re available 24/7, you better be fast. It’s as simple as that.”

But while these priorities may sound straightforward, ensuring

all that speed and latency is anything but—which is why Bodell

immediately broached the topic of getting New Relic mon-

itoring solutions up and running at AEO. To his delight, Bodell

found out that they already were—now it would just be a matter

of maximizing their use.

Rewind to several years prior, and AEO was just getting started

on its New Relic journey. Explains Matt Kundrat, production

support manager for digital technology at AEO, “When I joined

American Eagle five years ago, New Relic APM had been de-

ployed to monitor Ruby (for our Favorites application). But only

one engineer used it, and he had left, so at that point it was

truly shelfware. When our San Francisco office began work on a

mobile app, that team deployed New Relic Mobile to monitor it.

At that point, I decided to really get New Relic APM going again.”

Knowing that New Relic adoption would depend on AEO

staff understanding what they could achieve with the mon-

itoring tools, Kundrat worked closely with New Relic to set up

lunch-and-learn sessions, Q&As, and more to help get New

Relic monitoring ingrained in the company’s culture.

New Relic provided us with the visibility we needed to detect and remedy what could have been a significant issue on our busiest day of the year. It was this success that led our leadership to fully embrace New Relic, and that launched us on the monitoring journey we continue today.

Matt KundratProduction Support Manager for Digital Technology, American Eagle Outfitters

American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers

And it worked. Says Kundrat, “More and more people began using New Relic APM—

especially my own team for support and monitoring—and we ended up getting a

much better view of site performance. So, we merged the two New Relic accounts,

got rid of another performance monitoring tool, and eventually added New Relic

Browser and New Relic Synthetics to the mix as well.”

The icing on the cake came a few years later when AEO was able to add New Relic

Insights, gaining the ability to collect event and metric data from across the New Relic

Digital Intelligence Platform in real time, and then organize, query, and visualize that

data to answer key questions about application performance and customer experience.

Saving the biggest e-commerce day of the yearThose real-time insights came to AEO’s rescue on Cyber Monday in 2016, when

some of the company’s Java virtual servers began to die. Not only was Bodell’s team

able to spot and diagnose the problem swiftly using their New Relic dashboards, they

were able to provide minute-to-minute updates on their progress toward resolving

the problem. The results were impressive.

Explains Bodell, “If I hadn’t had those New Relic tools in front

of me—allowing me to provide the play-by-play to our internal

business partners—every executive in the company would have

been on the phone to Matt. And Matt would have been spend-

ing all his time fielding questions rather than doing his job.”

As it was, an engineer was able to make a configuration change

that quickly resolved the issue, and the hour that followed be-

came the largest digital hour in AEO’s history—a fact not lost on

the company’s leadership. Explains Kundrat, “New Relic provid-

ed us with the visibility we needed to detect and remedy what

could have been a significant issue on our busiest day of the

year. It was this success that led our leadership to fully embrace

New Relic, and that launched us on the monitoring journey we

continue today.”

Data-driven omniscienceFor Bodell, that monitoring journey begins on the giant TV

screen in his office, which plays just one show—New Relic—

round-the-clock. Featuring a custom dashboard that Bodell

Because I’m always looking at my New Relic Insights dashboard—whether it’s on the big screen in my office or in the corner of my screen during a meeting—I can keep my finger on the pulse of the business and ask my team highly contextual and data-driven questions.

Colin BodellChief Technology Officer, American Eagle Outfitters

American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers

© Copyright 2017, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 08.2017

himself created, the screen projects a variety of data he considers important,

including Apdex scores (to gauge user experience) and minute-by-minute traffic

displayed side-by-side with order rate, server load, and much more.

“Because I’m always looking at my New Relic Insights dashboard—whether it’s on

the big screen in my office or in the corner of my screen during a meeting—I can

keep my finger on the pulse of the business and ask my team highly contextual

and data-driven questions,” he says.

Bodell’s New Relic dashboard gets everyone invested in the quest for continuous

improvement. “That monitor serves as a constant reminder of how important latency

and performance are,” he says. “People are seeing minute-to-minute feedback, and

it helps them understand that anything they develop must improve those numbers.

If something they’re working on makes those numbers go down, they need to stop,

rethink, and try again.”

On-the-go monitoringKundrat and team are especially appreciative of the management-from-any-device

capabilities conveyed by the New Relic solutions. Kundrat, in fact, made good use

of them at New Relic’s own FutureStack conference in 2015, when during the keynote

he received an alert indicating that the system’s token management layer was spiking.

“I texted my lead engineer to take a look at the problem,” Kundrat says. “It turned

out that one of our three servers was not having traffic distributed to it in the

same way as the others. As a result, memory spiked and the server went down. By

the end of the keynote, I had solved the issue using the alert from New Relic and

the mobile experience.”

A baseline for savings and innovationNew Relic monitoring is also central to AEO’s efforts to keep costs low and per-

formance high for an environment that’s in constant flux. Says Bodell, “We’re con-

stantly evaluating technology solutions. The performance baseline we’re able to

capture with New Relic allows us to see not only how new products and services

are performing, but also how they’re using storage and compute capacity—both of

which are vitally important.”

That baseline will also help AEO migrate key systems to the cloud. Explains Bodell,

“As we move systems from on premise to a public-cloud fabric, New Relic will be

able to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of how specific services are per-

forming within both environments, which will be incredibly valuable.”

American Eagle Outfitters Ensures a Seamless, Omni-Channel Shopping Experience for Customers