How Volcom achieved 50% cost and 83% time savings with Hypotenuse AI
50%
600%
83%
Established in 1991, Volcom is a global lifestyle brand deeply rooted in the cultures of skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding. The brand’s ethos, encapsulated by the slogan “True to This”, reflects a commitment to authenticity, creativity, and the pursuit of one’s passions.
Over the years, Volcom has built a vibrant community of athletes, artists, and musicians. And with that, they’ve significantly expanded their product range, diversifying their offerings to include a wide array of apparel, accessories, and gear that cater to the surf, skate, and snowboarding communities.
Challenge: To launch collections in one-fifth of the time
As a leading lifestyle apparel brand, Volcom frequently launched new collections online, each comprising hundreds of products. For every launch, they typically required a lead time of about 5–6 months to meticulously plan and execute while upholding their high-quality standards.
The process involved research and planning, creating content briefs for copywriters, producing 2 sets of copy—one tailored for their brand and another for wholesalers—and ensuring all content aligned with their brand voice.
However, with recent pushes to accelerate time to market, they had been facing the challenge of meeting much tighter deadlines of just 4–6 weeks. While 5–6 months was already a stretch, a compressed timeline meant they wouldn’t be able to complete all the necessary steps for a successful launch.
The risk was that they might have had to delay the launch or proceed without copy, which hurts revenue and impacts organic traffic. Additionally, sparse product pages would be damaging to the brand’s image and negatively impact conversion rates, potentially by up to 78%.
The situation was further complicated by their role as a supplier to wholesale teams. Without content, these wholesalers would have to delay launch as well, straining business relationships.
Other solutions weren’t good enough
Like many others, they experimented with AI tools like ChatGPT. ChatGPT is trained to be a general-purpose tool but falls short when it comes to dealing with messy and complex product data. It isn’t trained for ecommerce or its specific industry, it doesn’t write in the brand’s unique voice and isn’t able to handle large volumes of products. While trying out ChatGPT, they faced a lot of repetition and little variation in the generated content, which ended up taking even more time to review and refine than to write from scratch.
Solution: Hypotenuse AI’s bulk generation and bespoke brand voice
Recognizing that this was going to be an ongoing challenge, Volcom knew they needed a solution to produce large volumes of content quickly while staying true to their brand voice, in a clean and efficient way rather than just hiring more writers.
And that is why they came to Hypotenuse AI.
Unlike the AI tools Volcom had tried, Hypotenuse AI is purpose-built for ecommerce, with an AI trained to deal with raw, messy, and complex ecommerce product information.
It has deep workflows built for ecommerce teams. The AI is trained in ecommerce and its industry-specific content. And that means the AI gets it—it has technical knowledge of the products and understands what content does well for the different industries, which in this case it’s fashion and apparel.
More importantly, Hypotenuse AI enables Volcom to generate all product page content in bulk, with little repetition and many creative variations. This includes product titles, descriptions, meta copy, and PLP footers, all crafted to align with their brand voice and guidelines.
With Hypotenuse AI, Volcom successfully met the compressed timeline, delivering high-quality, on-brand product page content. They also provided their wholesalers with comprehensive, ready-to-use information and copy.
The team now relies on Hypotenuse AI daily.
Kirsty, Global Director of Digital Copy & SEO Content, gave another practical example of how this has benefited them.
“Nearing launch, when the team says that they need 120 descriptions. In an afternoon with Hypotenuse AI, spending just a minute or two reviewing each description, I would have completed them all without having to find a copywriter who’s available and in our time zone.”
Prior to this, the 120 descriptions would have cost them almost a week, even with a team of copywriters. But with Hypotenuse AI, the Volcom team did it all in under a day.
Results: 50% reduced cost, 83% time saved
Now, each piece of product content takes just 1–2 minutes to review, even the most technical products take just 5-6 minutes—saving them approximately 140 hours each season.
They've also halved the cost of hiring copywriters.
In the past, the process started with creating a content brief on Google Docs, sending it to a copywriter, agreeing on a price, and then invoicing once they were done—often with multiple back-and-forths in between.
Now, they simply upload their product data onto Hypotenuse AI with a click of a button, product content comes out, they review it, and then it’s done.
And that’s just for content generation. As the team explores other features like automated product tagging and AI image enhancement, it will be exciting to see how much they can scale their time and cost savings.
Launch in as little as 2 weeks.
