ASICS has made digital transformation a priority, looking for better ways to serve the needs of a new generation of customer who spends time on new platforms and shops through new channels. Its goal is to establish ASICS as the fitness brand most helpful in the eyes of the company's digital consumer. ASICS leadership established ASICS Digital, the company's innovation division, to lead its digital transformation efforts. One of the key components of those efforts was to look for a localization partner to help accelerate growth. That's when they found Lilt.
"After taking a deep dive into how our global content and e-commerce systems worked, we realized that there were huge efficiency gains to be made through consolidation and standardization, so we migrated to a unified platform" said Dan Smith, President of ASICS Digital.
"Our goals with modernizing our localization stack are to expand our customer base and better compete with the new crop of nimble, digitally-native DTC brands," said Alessandra Binazzi, Director of Localization at ASICS Digital
"We're in a more competitive retail and e-commerce environment than ever, and we knew we needed to increase speed and operational excellence - and find a localization partner who could do the same. Lilt's vertically-integrated solution has had huge efficiency gains for ASICS. Now I finally have time to think more strategically about the how localization can help grow our business instead of spending all my time managing vendors," added Binazzi
"Lilt's vertically-integrated solution has had huge efficiency gains for ASICS. Now I finally have time to think more strategically about the how localization can help grow our business instead of spending all my time managing vendors."
-Alessandra Binazzi, Director of Localization, ASICS Digital
Getting products in the hands of global consumers faster with increased speed-to-market
ASICS's digital ecosystem encompasses a wide variety of critical IT systems like e-commerce platforms, mobile apps, analytics and consumer insights tools, and other digital solutions. Given ASICS's renewed focus on innovation and speed, Binazzi was excited by the efficiency gains."With a business that operates at a massive scale, things like new product introduction planning have to move fast in order to meet the company's launch deadlines. Working with previous localization providers in the past, translation turnaround times have often been the biggest pain point for ASICS," said Binazzi.
Lilt's approach to combining skilled human translators with an adaptive neural MT system gives ASICS the increased time savings it needed to better serve its partners across the business, all while preserving the high quality on which a brand like ASICS prides itself.
Lilt has been able to deliver 60% faster translation turnaround times for ASICS, making the localization team's job easier and enabling them to be even better business partners to their global stakeholders across product, marketing, digital, and merchandising teams.
Increasing localization ROI by driving costs down by 70%
As ASICS Digital becomes more of a center of excellence for digital transformation around the company's localization operations, cost control has become a major priority. Before Lilt, ASICS relied on 100% human translation. While quality was high, turnaround times were slow and costs were rising to unsustainable levels. By incorporating Lilt's human-in-the-loop solution, ASICS was able to not only increase turnaround times - but also achieve a 70% year over year decrease in localization cost."Lilt's solution gives us the ability to scale our localization program to address many different use cases and locales. We were hesitant to deploy raw MT given concerns about quality, but by combining Lilt's predictive, adaptive neural MT technology with its human translators who know our company, our products, and our brand, we get the best of both worlds!” remarked Binazzi.