This week, Occtoo attended the highly anticipated MACH one conference in London, England. In attendance was myself, our CTO Jimmy Ekbäck, and our Chief Growth Officer Henrik Nambord.
The MACH Alliance, launched in June 2020 is a group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for best-of-breed technology ecosystems. The alliance was founded on the common belief that the interoperability and open architecture of modern software will propel current and future digital experiences. Occtoo became a proud member of the MACH alliance in November 2020 and was the first member in the Data layer.
MACH one was the MACH Alliance’s first annual event, and in addition to the conference, they also held their first award ceremony. We’re overjoyed to say that one of Cartier's new digital customer experiences, powered by Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform, secured us a finalist spot in the ‘Best Retail Award’ category. You can read more about the digital initiative here.
We were fortunate to listen to an abundance of extraordinary speakers at the conference who gave their take on how best to transition to MACH technology and what value a MACH approach brought their organizations. Here is my summary of three of the most memorable presentations.
Fireside Chat: A Keystone for Commerce: Boohoo’s pivotal re-architecting business model.
Launched in 2006, Boohoo is now one of the world's most popular online retail brands in the world. Since then, Boohoo has acquired 11 more brands and accelerated its digital transformation efforts, and looked toward omnichannel business models
Technology Director Steve Nolan & Chief Architect Mark Elliott talk about how they turned to re-architecting their tech stack as a priority. First and foremost, they evaluated their commerce keystone product data and their PIM. No matter what they add or change from there onwards, high-quality and trustworthy product information is a prerequisite for success.
In 2021 Boohoo moved to Composable Architecture. They decided to launch one of their brand sites even if the set-up wasn’t complete with the functionality they had before. They transparently shared “mind the gap” re product enhancements, categorization, price and promotions, staging and preview, publishing, and of course the integration challenges that come with a multi-vendor solution. Still the decision to launch felt right afterward.
Steve and Mark summarized their talk by saying that MACH is the right way to go, but it's certainly not easy.
Keynote: MACH in practice, Harry Rosen
I was intrigued to understand the transformation they went through and decided to listen to the keynote given by Ian Rosen, following which I had the pleasure of talking to Tovi Heilbronn, Director of Digital Product & Experience.
Limited by legacy internal systems and a monolithic eCommerce platform, Harry Rosen was struggling to match the personalized, luxury experiences they have delivered in store for nearly 70 years with their digital experiences.
When COVID restrictions hit in March 2020 and shut all 18 of their stores, the team was forced to move fast, as the existing platform was unable to handle the spike in demand. With a focus on taking control of the customer journey by blending together a series of best-in-class MACH platforms, they launched a new digital experience in just 4 months through an all-hands-on-deck effort. With it, they were able to triple their online business in 2020 and have continued to grow at 20%+ through 2021 and 2022.
More importantly, the online business shifted away from being largely sales and promotional items. Aggressive investments in making web content more shoppable and developing tools for their 500+ in-store stylists to curate personalize webpages for clients also contributed to significant growth in average order value and client retention.
I hope I can visit Canada soon and try out the Harry Rosen experience myself.
Keynote: Re-tooling River Island for digital retail.
Head of Architecture David Edwards discusses why River Island needed to invest heavily to create a great omnichannel experience across all stores and the web.
Founded originally as a fruit and vegetable store in 1948, River Island is now one of the UK & Ireland’s largest fashion retailers, with more than 300 stores! Despite their large High-street presence, 40% of their sales are made online, so eCommerce is critical to the brand's continued success.
David discussed how River Island’s original commerce was built as part of a monolith and has been slowly customized over 15 years. This meant that they relied heavily on 3rd parties to change the system, and this slowed down innovation which caused increasing frustration and a growing backlog of tasks.
Following decisions to replace the all-digital infrastructure in 2020, the teams embarked upon a transformation to MACH architecture in order to more easily integrate new solutions (gaining greater control over each tool), dramatically improve content & personalization, and ultimately truly differentiate the business for consumers.
Their method was to avoid a big-bang re-platform and make the changes incrementally in smaller cycles. They also avoided big vendors who could offer them everything and instead chose smaller suppliers with rich experience and more time for them. They didn’t just want a tech vendor; they wanted a business partnership and inherit that innovation. Our partners work closely with our product team.
In David’s words …
“What we wanted to achieve was buy not build, to ensure we had solid commerce foundations and still have the flexibility to swap tech in and out. Inevitably you are forced to customize, and we needed the ability to do this.
We have been doing this for a couple of years. Working with commerce tools, we decided to decouple our front ends a couple of years ago and built out micro frontends, then we treat our monolith as headless. We then started to pick components out of our monolith and replace them. Slowly we are unpicking the monolith and replacing it with MACH compliant components.
Decoupling the frontend means we can chase those marginal gains. We can buy best of breed. With this focus, we are creating the things that set us apart. The MACH architecture provides me the flexibility to keep our system providers on their toes and we can replace them if they are not the best option for us.”
What’s next for River Island? “Delivering truly omnichannel services to our customers.”
In summary
Speed of adaptation and innovation is key to success in retail. If you don't jump into a future tech state with a MACH approach (Microservices, API-first, Cloud, Headless), you risk ending up with a big black box (aka a Monolith). With such a black box all kind of ideation gets stopped because with every new idea or innovation, everything must be rebuilt from the ground up. At Occtoo we are 100% dedicated to fast forward our customers' ability to move into an API-first approach, that will give you (using words from Niall Edwards at LEGO) speed, flexibility, and control.