Omnichannel Replatforming for a £400m UK Fashion Retailer

A UK fashion retailer with revenues approaching £400 million was operating an ageing monolithic e-commerce platform alongside a legacy point-of-sale estate across more than 80 stores. Online conversion had plateaued, peak season trading was increasingly fragile, and the retailer's small engineering team was spending the majority of its capacity keeping the existing platform alive rather than building new capability. A failed peak the previous Black Friday weekend had highlighted both the scalability ceiling of the current architecture and the absence of a credible disaster recovery posture. The CEO and CFO needed a replatforming programme that materially improved trading performance and resilience without creating a multi-year, all-or-nothing migration risk, and that protected the trading calendar across the November and December peak.

Intology was engaged as Programme Director to lead the omnichannel replatforming. We started by establishing a pragmatic target architecture built around a composable commerce stack, decoupling the storefront, order management and fulfilment layers from the legacy monolith and selecting best-of-breed components for search, personalisation and content. The migration was sequenced as a strangler pattern rather than a big-bang replatform, allowing trading-critical functionality to be re-platformed component by component while continuing to trade on the existing system. Store and online order management were unified onto a single platform, enabling true ship-from-store, click-and-collect and unified inventory views for the first time. A dedicated peak readiness workstream ran in parallel from August onwards, with rehearsed scaling, evidenced disaster recovery and a clear, freeze-and-rehearse approach to release management across November and December. Engineering capacity was rebalanced through a focused recruitment and partner strategy.