During the Covid-19 lockdowns, high street retailers were forced entirely online – with ecommerce suddenly becoming their only means of revenue.
Even the biggest brands had to adapt – and fast.
One perfect case in point is global fashion outlet New Look, which was left facing one of its biggest challenges in its 50+ years of existence when the pandemic hit.
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The brand had long prided itself on offering enjoyable in-person shopping – but in 2020 had to find a way to deliver the same kind of customer experience in a digital realm.
New Look CTO Ed Alford looked to digital leaders in the clothing industry for inspiration for how the company could refashion their e-commerce offering and their engineering organisation from the inside out. They needed to understand how they could prioritise speed and innovation to keep up with customer needs and desire.
The firm chose Slalom – a technology consultancy and sponsor of DTX + UCX 2023, Europe’s biggest digital transformation show – to streamline the transition and develop their digital platform, drawing on the resources of their dedicated division of Slalom Build (which blends web design, product engineering, analytics and automation).
The results were transformational – upgrading New Look to a microservices architecture while also constructing a brand-new in-house engineering capability and culture across their system.
The new ecommerce platform was suitably called ‘Fabric’ – enjoying a roll-out that gave shoppers faster, simpler access to New Look’s products.
Refashioning ecommerce
As lockdowns continued to hamper the high street in 2020, New Look sought the assistance of Slalom to deliver on two clear objectives:
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Provide a virtual shopping experience that matched their in store experience
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Build up their internal development team to be faster, more efficient and more cutting-edge
New Look wanted to give shoppers a modern omnichannel experience that could be tailored to users with personalisation and customisation. The company also needed a tech stack that would enable fast changes on demand.
New Look’s original website was designed with a monolithic architecture built on a single platform. Small changes always took time and bigger initiatives such as loyalty schemes seemed out of reach. Improvements were also costly and there was no guarantee they would succeed because the backend did not support testing.
Susan Cuffe, Client Services Lead at Slalom, said her team recognised exactly what New Look were trying to do – and what they needed to get there.
“New Look wanted to be self-sufficient,” she explained.
“They really wanted to have autonomy within the organisation to be able to drive a product which they could be proud of and evolve over time.”
Picking the perfect fit
Slalom Build was engaged to transition New Look’s storefront from an outdated version of Angular to React software.
The idea behind switching to React was to help New Look attract more talent and become self-sufficient (given that React developers are more available in the market). Building engineering capability within New Look would also give the organisation more autonomy to evolve their product quickly.
During the discovery phase, the Slalom team determined that a planned move to React software wasn’t going far enough to enable the speed and innovation that New Look were searching for, and it was clear that a minor alteration wouldn’t do the job.
Ultimately, Slalom recommended a complete refresh – moving the website to a modern microservice-based architecture. The switch gave New Look the flexibility to swap in the best vendors for their needs and budget.
New Look already had existing governance in place to approve vendors and technology decisions, but it often proved to be a drawn-out process. As Slalom gained trust, they were able to develop an expedited approach – meaning decisions could be made in weeks, instead of months.
During the build process, Slalom also worked to clarify the role of product owners in creating a backlog and gathering requirements. Previously, business analysts had often been filling the role, writing and getting approval of user stories. Recognising what needed to be done and who was doing it well led to some business analysts being promoted to product owners – where they’re prioritising and partnering more effectively with engineering teams.
Salom Build also helped recruit engineers, contributed hiring materials, and conducted interviews. They were on hand to dismantle silos and set up the agile culture across the firm – meaning both product and engineering teams are now empowered to make decisions and move ahead together.
A platform and delivery model for the future
Together, New Look and Slalom Build succeeded in building a modern, robust ecommerce platform with a flexible composable architecture.
With the new online store built on modern technology, shoppers could easily make a purchase – no matter where they were – with automation and security incorporated into the heart of the platform for efficiency and safety.
New Look CTO Ed Alford stated: “As a technology partner, Slalom Build was instrumental in helping us build out our ways of working, framework, and environment required to grow our own internal engineering function.
“I liked the model of Slalom helping set up an engineering function and define standards, coding principles, and frameworks, so that when we hire people, they are coming into a discipline that is already established, and they can pick up those ways of working as well as bringing in their expertise from the outside.”
Taking the customer-based vision forward, Slalom successfully developed a digital product that embraces digital transformation and continues to move with it.
Ian Mahoney, Director of Engineering Platforms at New Look, added: “Recruiting is a big job when you don’t have skilled engineers to interview other engineers.
“It was great to be able to get the support of some key Slalom employees in the DevOps and the engineering spaces to help us make sure we’re bringing in people of top quality.”
Slalom will be sponsoring the DevOps stage at DTX + UCX 2023.
The full lineup and event agenda is now live on the websites DTX Europe and UC EXPO.
Save the dates of October 4-5 and register online here.
