Serving up growth and impact with satisfying digital experience
At a glance
Jersey Mike’s Subs, a restaurant chain deeply committed to customer satisfaction and raising much-needed funds for local charities, sought to modernize and scale its website. Our teams collaborated to build a new site that provides white-glove services for Jersey Mike’s customers.
Impact
The redesigned website can also keep up with peak demand during the company’s nationwide Month of Giving in March, increasing both sales and donations collected.
Key Services
Industry
Restaurants & dining
Key Technologies / Platforms
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- JavaScript
- Contentful CMS
- Custom APIs
A website that truly serves the community
Started in 1956, Jersey Mike’s has grown from a sub shop in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, to a nationwide brand with more than 4,000 locations open and in development. The franchise stays true to its roots, focusing on fresh ingredients and authentic recipes, and providing customers with A Sub Above.®
As Jersey Mike’s continues to expand, its website provides an essential connection with customers. Visitors rely on this digital storefront to place orders, sign up to earn rewards with the loyalty program, MyMike’s™, find nearby locations, and redeem special offers. The site also plays a pivotal role in helping the nationwide brand make a difference in its customers’ lives through Jersey Mike’s solid commitment to charitable giving and community involvement.
Legacy tech was showing its age
The previous version of JerseyMikes.com was starting to show its age and required adjustments to meet future business and technology goals. Critical features were missing from the website, like the ability to make donations, which meant that customers weren’t getting consistency between the web and mobile channels. Jersey Mike’s also wanted to reinvent its web presence with an exciting new and modern design.
When it came to efficiency, the marketing team couldn’t update the site themselves—they had to send requests to IT, which took longer and tied up valuable developer time. The fact that the website was built using older technology meant that it was costly to maintain or change.
In addition, to prepare for Jersey Mike’s biggest fundraiser of the year—Month of Giving—the company wanted to ensure a seamless donation and sales process, anticipating increased online activity during March. During the month, Jersey Mike’s locations across the country join forces with more than 200 local charities, including hospitals, youth organizations, and food banks, accepting donations. The campaign culminates with the nationwide Day of Giving, when local Jersey Mike’s owners and operators donate 100 percent of sales to local charities.
Architecting a website for future growth
During the months we spent rebuilding the site, Slalom’s technologists seamlessly embedded themselves within Jersey Mike’s IT team. Our teams traded expertise and knowledge, diligently working to cocreate a flawless and friction-free experience.
The new website features mouthwatering and eye-catching videos that communicate the dynamic nature of the brand. Text syncs up perfectly with graphics, no matter the resolution, thanks to the implementation of truly responsive design. Promotions appear throughout the site, wherever they’re most relevant to customers.
The website and mobile app were brought into parity, which standardized the customer experience across platforms, ensuring consistent functionality for key features like digital orders, promo codes, and delivery options. In fact, there’s no longer a need to maintain separate APIs for the mobile app and website; it’s all powered from a single digital API, making it more efficient to implement new features.
Across the board, the new site architecture has saved employee time required for updating the content. The new website is a modernized, scalable platform designed to improve performance and flexibility. It uses Contentful as its composable content platform, which allows the marketing team to independently update content such as promotions, charity initiatives, and career pages. Marketing can now operate in a self-serve manner and be less reliant on IT, which frees up engineering resources for other work.
A new beginning for the Day of Giving
In addition to the customer experience and operational gains the new website has facilitated, this modernization effort helped Jersey Mike’s achieve outstanding results from its 2024 Day of Giving.
Pre-launch, the pressure was at a fever pitch. It was crucial that the Day of Giving was a success. Slalom’s team was thrilled to watch Jersey Mike’s staff navigate and adjust their monitoring and reporting activities before it was determined that the website was ready for prime time.
“On our big Day of Giving, the new site handled four to five times the normal traffic with no issues. It was a huge success,“ says John Hopper, director of customer technology at Jersey Mike’s.
Incredibly, Jersey Mike’s raised a record-breaking $25 million for local charities nationwide during March. Activity on the site was seamless all month—including the Day of Giving, Jersey Mike’s busiest day of the year.
Stephanie Nardini, vice president of IT at Jersey Mike’s, described the launch as “flawless. We didn’t roll anything back. It went live and stayed live. We could have easily switched back to our old site, but there was no reason to do that.”
A digital experience that feeds future growth
With a rock-solid MVP version of the site now live, Jersey Mike’s has plans to continue working with Slalom, adding digital features, maximizing new opportunities such as AI, and addressing other technology needs in the company. The sky is the limit for the franchise as it moves toward achieving continued growth and expanding globally.
Hungry diners are thrilled that their favorite sub sandwiches are easier to buy than ever, while community organizations have more financial support to do their important work.
