Clarks, a renowned British shoe manufacturer with a legacy of nearly 200 years, faced significant challenges due to their outdated, overly customized monolithic platform. These issues included high costs of ownership, lengthy downtimes during deployments, slow feature rollouts, and an inability to adapt to emerging shopper trends.

Clarks is a British international shoe manufacturer and retailer, who has been making shoes for almost 200 years. Looking to grow, Clark's progress was being compromised by their monolithic platform, which had been over-customised to offset under-investment in new technology, leaving them unable to offer the leading customer experience that their customers desired and with a complex set of challenges:

  • Platform upgrade not cost-effective due to high cost of ownership
  • Downtime of up to 10 hours during deployment (loss of trade)
  • Slow to market with new features due to heavily customized platform
  • Inability to scale for emerging shopper trends (e.g. ApplePay, mobile payments)
  • Inconsistent tech stack across Europe and Canada meaning high TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

In 2023, VML took charge of supporting Clarks' platform portfolio. Ensuring a seamless transition, VML took on responsibility for overseeing the UK, US, Canada, and Outlet sites, and later integrating the European sites and POS (Point of Sale) estate in 2024. This transformation marked the largest MACH implementation across these regions, replacing years of customizations with a streamlined, resilient system.

By leveraging MACH technologies, Clark’s ensured seamless integrations, rapid change implementation, and rollback capabilities. This resulted in a 50% reduction in Clarks' monthly AWS spend through optimized logging, event-based updates, and database efficiency. Additionally, a new event-based caching strategy reduced product update visibility from hours to minutes.

VML's expertise in event-driven architectures resolved legacy issues, notably enhancing product update concurrency by 400% without downtime. Advanced monitoring tools like New Relic facilitated proactive production environment management, reducing resolution times and improving platform maturation.

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Awards

2024 The Drum Awards Festival

2024 The Drum Awards Festival

Digital Experience: Retail

Bronze

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