CIO of Sports Products Brand HEAD on How It Drove a 20% Increase in E-Commerce Sales

Small business takeaway: 

• Sports-products maker HEAD rebuilt its multi-brand e-commerce site to function as both storefront and brand hub. A more flexible platform sped up page loads and simplified publishing of product pages and rich brand content—athlete profiles, videos, and how-to guides—so teams can keep campaigns fresh across categories. AI-enabled personalized recommendations help customers find the right gear faster, turning a better digital experience into stronger online sales. It’s a broadly applicable digital playbook for any business selling, educating, or building trust online.

Sporting goods supplier HEAD has been able to boost online revenue and streamline its digital operations by implementing a more flexible and dynamic digital platform.

The company is perhaps best known for its racquet sports equipment, but it also supplies apparel and gear for other sports, including scuba diving, snorkeling, and other water activities, along with winter sports including skiing and snowboarding, under several different brands, including HEAD, Tyrolia, Zoggs, and Mares.

Its diverse portfolio called for the deployment of a system that could handle a variety of digital tasks—not only e-commerce but also displaying content for the promotion of its various brands and products.

“We are a brand that also sells products online,” said Gerhard Spari, Chief Information Officer at HEAD, in an interview with CO—. “That is actually a very important differentiation, because unlike other websites that are fully focused on online sales, ours has a strong emphasis on brand storytelling and marketing. Management of the brand is very, very important.”

As such, being able to manage content in support of the company’s multiple brands and product lines—from HEAD tennis racquets to Zoggs swim goggles—called for a platform that facilitated the population of the company’s websites with content.

By transitioning to Adobe Commerce Cloud, HEAD has been able to improve its website’s performance on several fronts, including faster page loading and a more personalized experience for consumers. The benefits have included a 20% boost in online revenues in addition to more streamlined content management overall.

Online sporting goods growth seen outpacing physical retail

The North American sporting goods market totaled $1.43 billion in 2024, and it is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.6% between 2025 and 2034, reaching a value of around $3.26 billion by 2034, according to a report from Research and Markets.

The online segment is expected to outpace growth of physical retail, the report found.

However, brick-and-mortar retail remains important due to the tangible shopping experience it offers, according to the report.

“Physical stores allow consumers to try on products, get personalized advice, and make immediate purchases, which continues to attract a significant customer base,” the report concludes.

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HEAD’s new online platform enables personalized, AI-driven product recommendations 

HEAD could no longer improve its online performance given the limitations of its previous digital platform, said Spari.

“We have so many different categories, with different product managers and different campaigns, so very often data has to be transferred from our other systems to the e-commerce platform,” said Spari. “In the old platform this was [a process] that didn’t work well at all, and we had to make sure that it worked really well on the new platform.”

The new digital system is more scalable, streamlines operations and significantly improves website performance. HEAD also introduced a new visual design for the website that seeks to provide a more modern, engaging experience for users.

The e-commerce platform also incorporates live search and product recommendation features that facilitate personalization and AI-driven product suggestions.

New site designed to facilitate content management and brand ‘storytelling’

Spari said HEAD also implemented a simple solution for a new content management system (CMS), which leveraged HEAD’s existing architecture but was highly customized to meet HEADS’s demands.

The new CMS solution aids the company in its brand storytelling mission by making it easier to manage the content of the website, according to Spari.

“We have a very content-heavy site,” he said. “There’s a lot of storytelling, and a lot of content that is also quite dynamic, so we had to make sure that we had a very flexible setup.”

Content in the racquet sports section of the website, for example, includes descriptions of the athletes that HEAD partners with to promote its products, such as this brief biography of U.S. women’s tennis star Coco Gauff, complete with multiple videos and links to the line of HEAD racquets she supports.

Similarly, the “ski athletes” section of the HEAD website features biographies of the skiers from around the world who have competed on the global stage using HEAD equipment.

A pickleball section of the website, meanwhile, offers comprehensive content about the game, including an extensive tutorial about “how to play pickleball.”

Other content includes stylized videos showing athletes using HEAD gear with an energetic music soundtrack, news updates, features about the sports that HEAD supplies products for, and tips for selecting the right gear.

The design of the website allows HEAD to manage the content presentation independently from the functional back end.

“That means that all of the pages that you see on our site are basically built with modules … that can be easily maintained without technical know-how,” Spari said.

That was a critical aspect of the new platform because the content can change frequently, he said.

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A cautious approach to e-commerce

As a company that works closely with its retail distribution partners, HEAD takes a cautious approach to direct-to-consumer e-commerce sales.

The brand generates the vast majority of its sales through retail distribution. Selling directly to consumers through its own website has the potential to undermine those partnerships if it’s not conducted carefully, Spari said.

“If we were to be too aggressive regarding online sales, immediately our dealers would be upset,” he said. “It’s walking a very thin line.”

Apparel and sporting goods suppliers risk alienating their wholesale distribution partners by aggressively selling directly to consumers, he said. “In our case [it’s] better to be careful.”

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