EP356: The Secret To A Heritage Brand’s Digital Rebirth: How John Smedley Used Technology To Modernise Without Losing Its Soul

We effectively deleted the entire tech stack and started again. It gave us something that's quite rare in terms of it was a clean slate. I think we kept one thing and that was globally. Rather than thinking, what do we need to replace?

We could say if we're building it properly again from today, what would we choose? That changed the mindset of the entire project. You listen to Inside Commerce, a weekly e-commerce strategy, technology and CX-focused podcast hosted by experienced digital consultants and re-platform specialist James Gerd and Paul Rogers.

Get insights into e-com strategy leading brands, hear from industry thought leaders and leading tech vendors with practical advice to help you improve your online CX. Our topic this week is looking into John Smitty's migration from Adobe Magento to Sentra, what drove the experience and all the fun that comes with repatforming projects, which a lot of you will have been involved in and know that there's always stress points to that. and our guest state is Jamie Austin who's the head of e-com operations John Spedney. Hey Jamie how

are you? Hi guys how are you doing? All good all good we're all sat here on a boiling hot day so we're hoping that none of us pass out before we finish recording the episode but Jamie for those who haven't come across you before do you want to give us give them a quick flavor for who you are what you do also give those who don't know the brand so well a little snapshot into to what the

brand is okay so yeah john smedley is um i guess you would call it a heritage brand we've been around since 1784 manufacturing the uk um mainly knitwear and we'll be on the same site for you know since since we started so 240 years manufacturing in the same place and i guess it's quite a unique business because it's almost vertically integrated you know the

the raw material comes in one end and the garments come out the other end and it's quite unique and and yeah i'm jamie i'm head of e-commerce operations been with the brand for 25 years in various various different capacities fantastic thank you obviously that yeah it's one hell of an incredible heritage that isn't it in terms of timeline and longevity i guess it is it's

a rare thing isn't it in in this day and age yes yeah it is considering how many how many brands spring up um every year as well so and this is one of the reasons for doing these podcasts is talk to different businesses, different business models, different brand histories, and what they're doing from a tech and evolution point of view. So let's start with the,

you were on Magento for many years, and there are a lot of brands, either heritage or established econ businesses that evolved on Magento. Magento has been the mainstay and underpinning of many econ brands' growth. But then there's been a lot of change in the market over the last three to five years so what were the business drivers for changing now and what made you decide

that the adobe stack wasn't the right future direction i think you know you just mentioned that you know the the tech landscapes changed enormously over the last five years and i think that was the biggest driver for us you know me personally you know i'm interested in tech i'm interested in what's out there and what we can you know potentially change and you know magento

had served the business for a long time i think over time the environment around it had become too complex uh we'd previously been running a combination of magento one and adobe commerce and we eventually gradually consolidated those into one that was primarily for our outlet store that was on magento one and the main site was on adobe commerce and that created a lot of

operational complexity i would say and there's a wider question around upgrade risk technical debt and how much effort was being spent maintaining the platform rather than improving the customer experience. I suppose the key business driver for us was that we wanted to invest more of our energy into the customer and the brand experience, trading performance, not in just platform maintenance.

And I suppose in some respects, it would have been a much easier project to either stay on Adobe Commerce and simply redesign the front end or move to a more standard Shopify template. But we felt that it wouldn't have really fully addressed where we wanted to be as a brand, as a proposition and we needed a stack that gave us more flexibility allowed us to move faster and

supported a more modern customer experience and that meant thinking carefully about the front end checkout experience payment options and the ability to keep improving that experience over time and the decision to go headless was important because i think gave us more freedom in how we express the brand digitally allowing us to make better decisions around the commerce layer payments

customer experience. Integrations such as Voyardo were part of that wider ambition to make the experience more seamless and commercially effective. So the decision wasn't really about moving away from Adobe

for the sake of it. It was more about recognizing the future direction of the business required a different level of agility and customer focus. And I suppose as a heritage brand,

we didn't want to be held back by a heritage tech stack. Great. um so firstly before i ask the next question i would say that i love john smedley as well so yeah my dad used to have a few pieces when i was younger and i ended up inheriting a couple of

jumpers and yeah i've always really liked the brand um so my first question so james and i work on lots of projects and we see a mix of like really lean teams working on replatforming projects and you know massive teams um and it from reading the notes it looks like your team is a bit more on the lean side um can you just talk us through kind of how you found managing a project with this

much change um and like yeah how you managed it internally yeah you know we were a team of sort of