Case Study: Cole Haan brings new footwear to market faster with Slack

Slack helps Cole Haan bring new footwear to market faster

Cole Haan, the 95‑year‑old global footwear brand known for blending craftsmanship with modern design, needed to speed up a complex 15‑month go‑to‑market process while coordinating hundreds of people across time zones, vendors and product cycles. Email and fragmented tools created information silos, slow approvals and extra meetings that threatened the brand’s ability to respond quickly to trends and millennial consumer demands.

By adopting Slack company‑wide — using channels for campaign and product workflows, integrations (Outlook, Google Drive, Asana, Airtable) and custom bots like /merchinfo — Cole Haan centralized communication, file sharing and vendor handoffs. The result: faster, more transparent approvals, fewer meetings, consistent global execution and a major productivity boost (teams report doing about four times the work they did a few years ago) while maintaining steady employee costs and bringing trend‑driven products to market more quickly.

Cole Haan

Marsha Kublall

Vice President of Corporate Strategic Planning and Investor Relations