In the realm of fast-fashion e-commerce, new collections and weekly promotions mean high traffic volumes and close coordination with social media influencers. Agility and innovation are imperative for staying ahead. When an international women's fashion brand faced critical challenges from technical stability to ambitious project goals, they partnered with Alembic to build both their technology platform and their internal capacity to support it. The result was a business platform that empowered their ability to launch new campaigns and tackle new markets.
Challenge: Navigating Complexity
The client found themselves in a precarious situation with their most experienced developer leaving the company. The new team needed to quickly come up to speed and critical issues such as frequent outages as well as key technology migrations. With multiple high-stakes projects on the horizon, including multi-currency support, the company urgently needed a strategic partner to help steer them towards stability whilst delivering on their roadmap.
Solution: Strategic Collaboration and Agile Excellence
Alembic swiftly assembled a small yet proficient team skilled in AWS, operational expertise, frontend development and e-commerce. Integrating seamlessly into the client's Agile model, Alembic collaborated closely with key stakeholders to help establish efficient planning, testing, and delivery frameworks.
Adopting an incremental approach, Alembic identified opportunities for improvement within the existing technology stack, minimising risks and maximising efficiency. When the internal lead developer departed, Alembic facilitated a seamless transition, ensuring project continuity through meticulous recruitment and onboarding.
Outcomes: Driving Innovation and Reliability
The partnership between Alembic and the fashion brand yielded transformative results:
Consistent Delivery: The development team built up a steady cadence of production updates - delivering to production every week. Enhanced processes and tooling facilitated reliable deployment, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Successful migrations: Alembic enabled the e-commerce team to move to a new search platform, enhancing their ability to merchandise products. The switch between providers “just worked”, launching without an issue.
Process Optimisation: Retrospectives evolved into forums for optimising developer efficiency, fuelling innovation and collaboration. Ideas for enhancements replaced issue resolution, driving sustainable growth.
Enhanced Functionality: Multi-currency support, platform migrations, and advanced search capabilities bolstered the brand's e-commerce capabilities. Products now feature accurate pricing across currencies, while seamless platform transitions optimised merchandising.
Improved Reliability: Technical enhancements and modernisation efforts reduced downtime and enhanced user experience. Cutting-edge technologies like NextJS, React, and TypeScript fortified the codebase, mitigating outages and improving reliability.
Why We Love This Client: A True Partnership
As a growing organisation, this client continually embraced challenging opportunities, whether it be expanding into new markets or trying innovative ways of working. Their commitment to process excellence enabled us to establish an efficient and reliable delivery cadence. Their transparency, receptiveness to feedback, and genuine appreciation for our partnership have fostered a relationship built on mutual respect and shared success.
