Transforming a fast-growing furniture retailer at pace

When we began working with the team at London-based furniture brand Swoon, they were experiencing operational and technical challenges.

Without an in-house technical team, their entire inventory was managed solely on spreadsheets. It was labour-intensive, expensive and led to issues with stock accuracy and customer communications.

Swoon also needed to replatform. They were rapidly coming to the end-of-life on Magento 1 and had outgrown their systems. We needed to automate their stock management processes and implement sustainable, scalable eCommerce technology, fast.

Focusing first on the operational challenge, we built bespoke enterprise integrations that connected their logistics, order management and warehousing. With their entire stock management process now automated, they had an accurate and up-to-date view of all of their inventory. We then built our first PWA Accelerator.

Using Magento 2 as the eCommerce engine, we chose a progressive web application for the front end. This enabled us to run rapid iterations between design and development. It also delivered significantly faster page load speeds and greater flexibility in layout.

Whilst we’ve reduced page load time by a massive 70%, we’ve also transformed how Swoon operates. We’ve created significant business value in automating back-end processes, giving them a true view of their inventory; while building a fast, future-facing website that’s fit for the world of mobile commerce.

Working in a headless environment meant that we delivered our fastest Accelerator yet, getting them live in just 86 days!

Since launch, we’ve continued to optimise Swoon’s back-end processes. We’re currently developing their “WISMO” offering, shifting order tracking from people-intensive customer communication, to an automated, real-time process. By better leveraging the data from freight forwarder Zencargo, we can now provide a more granular view of customer orders; different SKUs can be tracked at different shipping stages from manufacturing to transit, so the customer can track every item in their order at any given time.

"The team have helped us to transform how we operate. Scaling-up and automating our processes, while giving our customers a fast, mobile-friendly experience, has prepared us for the next stage of our journey.“

Brian Harrison, CEO, Swoon