Customer Spotlight: Inspired by Olympic Innovation

Olympic athletes inspire us because of their dedication to success. It’s an infectious spirit that permeates every facet—even beyond athletics. As we get ready to celebrate the Opening Ceremony tonight, we wanted to reflect on how one company was born out of an idea sparked at the Summer Games. Thirty years ago, a set of identical twins attended the Summer Olympics and witnessed the latest advances in equestrian equipment, so they decided to bring the technology back home and founded Dover Saddlery, a leading retail business for horse tack, stable supplies, and equestrian apparel.

Since then, the company has continually innovated its business model to compete in the digital and physical marketplace by leveraging technology and smart use of customer data.

“We’re not just doing it online. We’re also going through deeper integration into the offline marketing,” says Monique Trulson, Director of eCommerce at Dover Saddlery, “You being a website person and you being a store person…you should be treated the same. You should have that same experience because Dover is Dover is Dover and that’s it.”

Dover Saddlery’s innovation has positioned the brand to be a global influencer for data-driven marketing. They were recently asked to speak in Australia for the ADMA Global Forum and share their insights with the world’s brightest minds.

Former Vice President of Marketing, Lorelle Carpenter speaks about the company’s digital transformation with Tealium, and how they built a data model that showed them the best places in the nation to open up a retail front and capture a holistic view of their revenue standpoint.

“We are using some products from Tealium that really give the ability to take your offline data about customers and load it up into the website or the Tealium tool and then when those customers hit the site they are immediately identified with all of their offline rich data. And what that allows us to do is then target the imagery that we give them and the messaging we give them on the site in real time across devices.”

Their growth is the outcome of relying on existing customer data empowered by Tealium products, which paved the way to build a dynamic website that offers real-time personalized experiences based on context. Now Dover Saddlery is using the data to drive another major growth initiative, opening up their 32^nd brick and mortar location.

As we watch the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio we can expect many inspiring moments to happen—athletes who remain resilient no matter the outcome in front of a global stage.  It can serve as a reminder to spark new methods of approaching our goals in business, just like it sparked an innovative idea with a pair of identical twins over thirty years ago.