The Very Group

With the goal of making changes on the site quicker and more frequent, the team needed to shift their customer experience away from their existing system to a new platform.

In collaboration with the Very Group, we began a discovery process to develop a multi-year tech investment strategy and roadmap. This roadmap needed to include both the updated tech criteria and tools, as well as the workflow, team, and business operation changes necessary to implement it.

The first step was to understand the overall architecture needed for a composable setup. We took a look at the components of their existing system and identified the mission-critical areas of the business along with desired improvements for site experience and functionality. From there, we prioritized work according to the business priority.

To facilitate the shift towards an enhanced customer experience, we created a multi-year platform transition plan centered around a microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH) architecture. We are currently working on building out a custom presentation layer that is supported by several (MACH) partners. This setup will enable customer experience changes to be delivered even faster than before.

commercetools was identified early on as the Very Group’s preferred commerce platform. To support the team in rolling it out, we assembled specific teams around a few core work areas: front-end development, back-end development, data transformation, and search tools.

With dynamic search being an important element of high-performing eCommerce sites, we supported them in evaluating a handful of search providers before making their choice. They decided to go forward with constructor.io to achieve the customized customer experiences they were looking for.

One of the first project phases we tackled was analyzing and integrating their product information management system (PIM) and product details pages (PDP). As a retailer that sells multiple products from different brands, having a robust PIM and PDPs are two areas that are critical to get right in the new system.

For the PIM, our discovery exercise found that the solution would require customization to accommodate the wide variety of data points the system had to manage. This included data like product color, style, material, photos, size, and pricing for each product. As the Very Group’s product catalog is made up of items from other brands, the system needed to be able to accommodate data that is constantly changing across data sets. We worked to ensure there was a robust data transformation plan that would feed changes accurately into the product pages.