Kicking Off with Dick’s Sporting Goods
When the legendary Dick Stack started his bait and tackle shop in Binghamton, NY in 1948, I don't think he could have imagined it growing into a (roughly) six billion dollar business with hundred of stores around the country and one of the most successful e-commerce operations in the industry. When we started working with Dick's Sporting Goods (DSG) earlier this year, we had a hard time imagining what the engagement would produce—but we knew it would be fun.
We love sports. We love the outdoors. We love digital. We're just getting started with DSG, and already we've tackled two challenging, exciting projects.
Hell Week
Hell Week is an annual rite of passage for high school football players everywhere, and for the second year DSG worked with the talented team at Anomaly to produce a short film about the experience. Viget created a responsive site to promote the show, which aired on ESPN2, and then to provide a permanent online home for fans to replay the show and dive deeper into the featured coaches and players.
Jersey Report
If you've been to a pro football game lately you can't help but notice how many fans support their favorite teams by wearing a jersey. DSG sells a lot of them. Working with DSG and Catalyst, we wondered what stories the data behind all those jersey sales could tell. Does getting benched cause a player's jersey sales to tank? Does the hottest rookie in the league sell more jerseys than one of the best to ever play? Which team playing next Monday Night sells more jerseys overall? Can one player really sell more jerseys than an entire team? For that last question, Washington fans like me can now instantly get an answer to share with our friends in Dallas:
The Jersey Report is a site where fans can dig into data normally reserved for day traders. Rivals can back up their trash talk with facts. Anyone can slice and dice the data to find their own storylines in leagues full of storylines. Everyone can easily purchase their favorite jersey through DSG’s online store.
We started with football, just launched hockey, and both basketball and baseball are coming up fast. So, no matter what sport you're a fan of and whether you own a jersey or are still shopping, the Jersey Report will have something for you.
For Viget, this was a fun one, and not just because some of us are sports fans. We solved some really interesting challenges inside of a tight deadline. From a technical perspective, we worked with Mobispoke to set up a secure hosting environment and gather a nightly data set from DSG, which we then process to be manageable for the highly customizable interface layer. For the design, the site needed to be not only responsive, but also perform across devices while presenting a lot of data-driven design elements and dynamic charts.
Finally, to help fans understand what they can do on the Jersey Report, we created this 60-second promo video:
For more details on how these projects came together, check out our Hell Week and Jersey Report Case studies. We'll continue to pull back the curtain as we launch new work with Dick's Sporting Goods in the months and years ahead.
