How product feed management gave New Balance a leg up – and increased revenues

New Balance

Drapers’ recent Connected Consumer report showed that a significant 40% of the 2,000 UK consumers we surveyed now name shopping on their mobile phone as their preferred fashion channel. But, while mobile might be their favourite, the report also showed there is now no linear path to purchase for fashion consumers.

In the survey shoppers report that they now browse for and purchase fashion across a growing number of channels – including online on their mobiles, in stores, across social media channels, via Google searches, on marketplaces and resale platforms. This proves that brands and retailers need to be where their customers are.

But for a business such as footwear brand New Balance, which operates across several international regions and sells thousands of SKUs, effectively managing its product data and digital marketing across this growing number of sales channels presents a big challenge.

To supercharge its strategies, in 2017 New Balance started working with digital marketing agency Brave Bison. In a collaborative effort, Brave Bison connected the footwear brand with product feed management platform Feedonomics in 2022.

Through centralising, streamlining and AB testing, the results have been significant: conversion rates (CVR) have risen 15%, sales increased by 21% and revenue is up 22%.

Drapers meets Zeynel Oruk, general manager ecommerce and marketplace EMEA at New Balance, and Andy Hunt, head of paid media operations at Brave Bison, to find out more.

What are the biggest challenges the fashion industry is facing when it comes to digital marketing in 2025?

Zeynel Oruk: The fashion industry is navigating one of the most dynamic and complex marketing landscapes we’ve seen to date, with constant change happening almost daily.

Customer journeys are no longer linear: shoppers switch between platforms and devices rapidly, moving from social discovery to paid search, marketplaces and brand-owned ecommerce.

Delivering consistent, personalised experiences across all these touchpoints puts significant pressure on data, infrastructure, feed management and creative execution.

On top of that, signal loss [when you lose the ability to attribute where your customers are coming from because of tightening privacy regulations and the phasing-out of third-party cookies] and increasing complexity around measurement make it even harder to drive performance effectively.

What trends are driving this area of the industry?

ZO: We’re seeing a clear shift towards platform-agnostic and discovery-led shopping behaviours. Social commerce has moved the moment of intent further up the funnel.

Shoppers are no longer just searching for products – they’re being inspired by creators, communities and algorithms before they even realise what they want.

To keep up, brands and retailers need to ensure their product data and creative assets are accurate, up to date and optimised for every platform and every market.

How would you sum up where New Balance was with its digital marketing strategy? What were the challenges it was looking to solve?

ZO: Scalability and feed management were limiting digital marketing performance.

Our campaigns were performing well in core markets, but inconsistent product data and disconnected systems created inefficiencies – especially as we scaled across EMEA.

With multiple regions and thousands of SKUs, New Balance’s existing infrastructure made it difficult to optimise quickly and deliver the consistency that performance mar­keting demands.

We needed a partner and a process that would allow us to centralise and streamline product data, unlock more granular optimisation opportunities and ultimately improve performance throughout the customer journey.

Why did you choose to partner with a feed management solution?

Andy Hunt: Having worked with several different feed management providers at Brave Bison, we found Feedonomics offered better data transformation capabilities and stronger overall functionality.

The platform is intuitive and well supported, and learning resources such as Feed Academy that help the team troubleshoot issues and stay in control of ongoing optimisations.

We use Feedonomics to fill the gaps in our clients’ product feeds, and then optimise and distribute this data across platforms, ranging from social media to affiliate networks and marketplaces – overall giving us better outputs at scale.

How did New Balance optimise its ad campaigns?

AH: With more than 20,000 products in the New Balance feed, Brave Bison worked with Feedonomics to create custom labels for segmentation, giving us much greater control over campaign setup and targeting.

New Balance

These improvements contributed to significantly better results. These include costs decreasing by 38%, cost per click (CPC) decreasing by 26%, sessions increasing by 5%, conversion rate (CVR) increasing by 15%, sales increasing by 21% and revenue increasing by 22%.

New Balance’s return on ad spend (ROAS) also increased by 95%. What were the three main things that made this happen?

AH: First was improving data quality and optimising product information.

Second was tailoring product feeds for spe­cific marketing exports.

And finally, the application of advanced optimisations and ongoing AB testing.

How important is AB testing?

AH: Effective feed management isn’t a “set and forget” exercise. With the marketing landscape constantly evolving, we rely heavily on AB testing to ensure our approach stays effective.

Interestingly, we’ve often seen improvements in metrics we weren’t specifically targeting – for example, conversion rates increasing during tests focused on engagement or traffic.

What other tips do you have in terms of things that have worked for New Balance?

AH: Language localisation has been a big win. In previous tests, we saw uplifts after adding “sneakers” to product titles across markets.

We’ve since evolved that approach by replacing the term with each market’s native word for “shoes”. For example, in France, we now use “chaussures”, which resulted in a 19% increase in sales and a 27% improvement in conversion rate.

What advice would you give to other fashion brands and retailers seeking to enhance their digital strategies in similar ways?

AH: Your product feed is the foundation of paid media performance.

Poor-quality feeds will undermine even the best creative and targeting strategies. Investing in feed management allows you to scale faster, reach the right customers and adapt quickly to platform or market changes.

Be bold with testing. Whether it is formats, messaging, audiences or bidding strategies – it is the constant iteration that drives sustained growth.

And finally, centralise, automate, then localise. A solid global framework creates space for market-specific adaptations without adding inefficiency.