Steve Nolan and Mark Elliott were relative newcomers to fashion e-commerce giant boohoo but they faced a conundrum when the company was rapidly assembling a ‘who’s who’ of UK retailers. Their job: to ensure that technology acted as an accelerator rather than a boat anchor slowing down the business.
As well as selling under its own brand, boohoo has become home to globally recognised brands including, PrettyLittleThing, Karen Millen, Dorothy Perkins, Warehouse, Burton, Oasis, Coast and Wallis, as well as famous feminist brand Nasty Gal.
Steve, boohoo’s CTO, jokes that he “aged 10 years after a rollercoaster of a journey in three years” as he helped scale its digital capability. Chief architect Mark had his “passion for high-scale performance enterprise e-commerce solutions” fully tested by boohoo as the company’s can-do culture demanded rapid deployment of systems to cope with equally rapid business expansion.
The scale of boohoo’s operation can be measured in large numbers with nigh on £2bn in sales (up 61 per cent in two years), from its 14 destinations, 19 million active customers, 65 million social media followers and around 190 million items shipped globally.
Little wonder that a legacy Sage 200 back-end was feeling the strain before digital transformation kicked in. And that strain would surely worsen were boohoo to be successful in chasing a global addressable market of half a billion buyers and achieve its mission of offering fashion for everyone at amazing prices with unrivalled choice.
“It was hard to make changes and it was creaking,” Mark recalls, which is no surprise given that it was Sage’s biggest UK installation… and seven times the second largest.
The rapid rollout of new brands as boohoo continued its M&A spree meant a more adaptive infrastructure was required. It was this overarching consideration, together with a need to drive efficiency and optimize the boohoo supply chain, that led Nolan and Elliott to embark on what they call a “Sage detox” program.
The plan: to jettison bolted-on functionality that sat atop Sage and replace it with a modern, composable MACH architecture plugged into Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 ERP system. Products were centralized in a single Akeneo product information management (PIM) system with the aim being that “you didn’t need an IT degree as a business user to utilize the PIM”.
IT at the boohoo group operates fast in what is a fast, ever-changing sector: a WordPress project was completed in three weeks, for example. Minimal viable products are often rolled straight into production where possible.
A paper-based order management system was fully automated, eliminating the up-to-25 minutes orders took to be completed when keying in was required. “The digital back-end revolutionized the way the business operates,” Mark says, enabling the company to stay on top of 25,000 SKUs that are added every week.
There were other considerations too as boohoo stepped up its automation and manufacturing investments just as it was onboarding new partners and brands. And then of course there was Covid to deal with…
Lessons? Nolan and Elliott can share a few. Although boohoo’ new web operations were created quickly and delivered excellent performance, access to skills in the time of the Great Resignation remains a challenge. At a time when “every person gets tapped on the shoulder for a new job every week”, that’s tough, laments Elliott. That means a lengthier-than-ideal reliance on systems integrators has been necessary.
Also, dealing with the vagaries of product categorization, dynamic pricing and promotions, content publishing, staging and previewing have been challenging, requiring close collaboration between IT and merchandisers. Differentiating between caching static data and changing, personalised data for performance needed attention and, even in the age of open APIs, integration between systems is not easy.
But for an adaptable e-commerce operation, they both agree “MACH is absolutely the right way to go about it,”. In a world where fashions change by season, a flexible environment is needed and that is putting the composable services world on the catwalk and in the spotlight.
Authors: Mark Elliott, Chief Architect, boohoo group
Steve Nolan, CTO, boohoo group