How Hanes increased conversions by +300% with data-driven insights

Metrics impacted

The company

Approximately 9 out of 10 US households own a product from Hanes, according to PESTEL Analysis. Now part of Gildan, Inc., the company's direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand portfolio also includes Bali Bras, Maidenform, Playtex Bras, Bonds, and WonderBra, selling a wide range of activewear, underwear, and intimates apparel across their sites. 

As customer behavior continues to evolve—with the emergence of AI applications, the rapid growth of TikTok Shop, and the ever-growing dominance of Amazon, Hanes has had to clearly define the purpose of its DTC sites. 

These sites now serve as a direct line to consumers, a test-and-learn environment for content and products, the primary place to showcase their brand story, and a way to inform strategy across other retail channels, including Amazon.

The challenge

The Hanes team was looking to optimize their digital experience to maximize market impact, with key considerations focused on knowing: 

• What initiatives to prioritize

• Where the biggest impact could come from

• Implementing data-driven decision-making 

• Knowing what’s working and what’s not

Their existing tools weren't delivering what they needed to make confident decisions. Greg Harron, Director of Digital User Experience and Design, explains: 

Current tools didn’t provide enough granularity and detail to fully understand what content was working and what was not. And we had no clear way of really quantifying the magnitude of impact on conversion and revenue that content and user experience (UX) design changes could provide.

Greg’s team didn’t have visibility into aggregated behavior patterns for common page types, like product detail pages (PDPs) and product listing pages (PLPs). They lacked an easy way to visualize customer journey patterns and identify friction points and opportunities.

The solution

Hanes started its experience analytics journey with a free Contentsquare account to build a data-driven approach. After showing tremendous value with basic heatmaps and session replays, they upgraded their account for both the Hanes.com and Maidenform.com sites.

"One of the most powerful things in sharing the Contentsquare demo is just the ease of understanding of what you're seeing and the direct visualization of what's happening, particularly around things like Zoning Analysis," Greg shares.

The primary users of Contentsquare include Greg’s team—2 UX/UI designers and 3 front-end developers—with growing adoption across cross-functional site teams, including retailers and merchandisers.

To drive engagement and build expertise, the team created ‘Contentsquare Jamborees,’ meetings held every couple of weeks with cross-functional groups to share data and spark discussions. These sessions have increased engagement and driven better project prioritization across the organization.

Greg shared 3 examples of how the Gildan brands use Contentsquare to drive digital growth and optimize their customer experiences. 

1. A/B testing PDP content to increase add-to-cart rates

Hanes and Maidenform used Contentsquare on their websites as a testing ground to help optimize their Amazon pages. 

They did this by leveraging Contentsquare data from their DTC sites to inform their strategy for third-party retailers like Amazon. Despite the different selling context, the data quality and analysis in Contentsquare also helped the team make changes to how they present their products on Amazon, positively affecting sales.

"Our DTC sites serve as a very important direct line to our consumers, and Contentsquare helps us make the most of that in terms of understanding our customers and what is working/not working on the site."

Greg Harron

Director of Digital User Experience and Design

Using Zoning Analysis with A/B segments, they tested different content layouts and messaging to understand what resonated best with customers. 

The result? Up to a +25% increase in add-to-cart conversion rate on the best-performing pages, providing transferable learnings to Amazon and other third-party retailers.

2. Streamlining category navigation to improve purchase conversions 

User testing revealed that customers struggled to shop by fabric (like cotton) or collection on category pages. 

The team used Contentsquare's Journey Analysis, Page Comparator, and Impact Quantification tools to redesign the men's underwear category page, adding better content guides and filtering options.

The result? A +50% jump in purchase conversion rate and a significant drop in exit rates on the pilot test page. The team is now scaling this optimization to other categories, such as women's bras.

"The level of detail and granularity regarding interactions with page elements provided by Contentsquare was superior to other analytics tools. Contentsquare allows for both micro-level and macro-level storytelling, enabling users to move from journey analysis to understanding content effectiveness."

Greg Harron

Director of Digital User Experience and Design

3. Adapting campaign landing pages to cut bounce rates

For a ‘Stock Up and Save’ campaign, the team made real-time pivots based on Contentsquare data. 

Analysis of the customer journey revealed a high bounce rate on the campaign landing page.

This insight led to a full redesign of the campaign landing pages with more prominent product recommendations to keep customers engaged.

The result? A -36% reduction in bounce rates, 4x increase in conversion rate, with users staying on-site longer and engaging more.

The results

Since implementing Contentsquare, Hanes has seen transformational results across its website:

• +25% increase in add-to-cart conversion on tested PDPs

• +50% improvement in purchase conversion rate on test category pages

• 4x increase in campaign landing page conversion rates

• -36% reduction in campaign bounce rates

Contentsquare has transformed the culture for Hanes, from opinion-based decision-making to a data-driven approach, allowing teams to prioritize content more effectively—based on actual user behavior. 

"We’ve seen a clear shift to a more confident, informed, data-driven approach to optimizing our websites. The change in mindset has been significant—more team members want to know what the data says to help make decisions in site and content planning. Based on our impact analysis and conversion optimization efforts, we have seen a very positive ROI on our investment in Contentsquare. The potential revenue impact from our Year 1 projects alone could easily exceed 5x our cost for adding Contentsquare to our data set.”

Greg Harron

Director of Digital User Experience and Design

What’s next? 

Looking ahead, Hanes is expanding its use of Journey Analysis to identify opportunities to personalize and optimize specific channels and behavior patterns.

They're also expanding their use of Impact Quantification and Sense to better quantify the bottom-line impact of their changes and communicate those wins across the organization. 

The team is currently trialing the User Lifecycle extension, focusing on acquisition analysis and segmenting user journeys, with a view toward personalization opportunities in 2026.