This month, our Customer Spotlight shines on RBX Active, a premier online retailer of activewear for over a decade! Built on the idea that being healthy and active should not be a luxury but rather a basic need, RBX Active seeks to bring fashionable fitness apparel and products to everyone at affordable prices.
From Traditional Retail to Online Pioneers
The story of any company is the story of its people. RBX Active is no different, growing out of the career of Adam Hanan, a Partner of RBX Direct and the driving force behind RBX Active. Adam didn’t start in fashion, but he did start in NYC, retailing computers and high-end electronics in various shops on 5th or Madison Avenue. Adam was always a digital commerce pioneer, building websites in HTML long before Shopify or template-driven commerce was even a fever dream. Having to do everything personally was a bedrock education for Adam in the foundational principles of ecommerce, products, inventory management, payment, and anything and everything. It was an adventure when ecommerce was a DIY addition to brick-and-mortar businesses.
Physical Media: the days of the future past?
Adam’s next step forward was to something we now think of as somewhat backward – unless you’re a vinyl collector like me, selling physical media, specifically DVDs, CDs and even VHS. This experience introduced him to Amazon, then a fierce competitor, which was at the time primarily still a site to buy physical media, if you’re not old enough, trust me, I was there, and there was a time they sold only books! This provided Adam an early opportunity to see and learn about the Amazon reselling game at a time when virtually no one was aware that it was even possible.
Adam balanced managing physical locations, wholesaling, and 3rd party selling on Amazon for a time as the market matured into the first wave of true ecommerce we know today, but he wasn’t stopping there. As the media business went digital, Adam did what great businessmen do, he pivoted to another product line, fashion, something less likely to be delivered to you in bites!
RBX Active Begins
Soft goods and activewear were a different world from durable goods and media, but commerce is commerce, and Adam quickly adapted. Adam credits the early success of RBX Active to good hires; finding passionate people with expertise in the industry who could fill in Adam’s knowledge gaps allowed RBX Active to be effective from day one. This also highlights one of my favorite parts of our visit to RBX Active, which was seeing the seamless ways the team collaborated; whether at the office or working remotely, all their team members were constantly moving their efforts forward. It reminded me of golfing as a child. One of my first lessons was that even a bad shot helps if it leaves you closer to the green; always get closer. The RBX Direct team embodies this as it continues to grow its presence by taking on new brands such as Avalanche Outdoor Supply and soon multiple children’s brands from within the CP Brands Group umbrella.
From Direct to Consumer E-Commerce with the other guys to StoreAutomator
RBX Active hummed along for the better part of a decade using the traditional multi-channel management options in their tech stack. However, there were limitations; for one thing, they couldn’t export their data to create their own BI dashboard. Just over four years ago, Adam decided to switch to StoreAutomator. Adam cited three big advantages to StoreAutomator over his previous channel management partner ChannelAdvisor: your data is your data, the flexibility of the system, and the open APIs. Using the open APIs allowed Adam and his team to build a dashboard that allows them to track sales trends and profitability more accurately.
Beyond the Four Walls of Brick and Mortar Retail
Physical retail comes with limits; if a display has four arms, you want four colors of an item. Extra large or small sizes, there’s less room for your biggest selling sizes, and the list could go on ad infinitum. E-commerce isn’t constrained by these physical and practical limitations. As Adam pointed out, and which RBX Active learned through their dashboarding of data, for something like Amazon, the more variations you have the better an item does, as it drives more traffic to the items page and it aggregates higher.
Furthermore, having up to the minute data available by product category with the ability to drill down to the SKU level has also allowed RBX to find product trends and whitespace in the market. Using those findings to update the product assortment year over year to fuel their continued growth. Adam and RBX continue to grow and adapt using the flexibility of StoreAutomator to power their digital Transformation; check out what we can do for you!
Check out https://www.rbxactive.com/ and don’t hesitate to reach out to sales@storeautomator.com to inquire about powering a digital ecommerce transformation of your own!