Leading Jewellery Brand Streamlines Content Delivery With Headless CMS

Retail and Consumer Goods

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Challenge

A leading jewellery brand needed to move from a monolithic architecture to a centralised headless content platform to reduce operational costs, increase efficiency in content delivery and seize globalisation and transformative opportunities.

Outcome

Over a two year partnership, we supported the brand to execute a staged migration which involved decoupling legacy content modules from the old platform and migrating them to a new headless content management system (CMS) iteratively.

Our client, a market-leading, premium jewellery brand, operates a network over 300 stores across the globe with multiple international digital platforms.

Over the last three years, it has been on a transformative journey, reshaping many aspects of the business, underpinned by a strategic, customer-led framework to enhance its digital and omnichannel capabilities. As part of its digital transformation, it required a more flexible and efficient solution to meet content management needs. To do this, it needed to migrate from legacy systems that no longer met the business’s needs, to more modern technology stacks that would support the future vision of the business.

In a trusted partnership spanning more than two years, we worked collaboratively with the brand’s teams and partner vendors, to undertake the journey towards a headless CMS, enabling the client to own, manage and build its own platforms.

Existing platforms caused a bottleneck

In efforts to reduce operational costs and increase efficiency in content delivery, the jewellery brand recognised the need to move from a monolithic architecture to a centralised headless content platform. Its current platform no longer met the requirements necessary for fast content delivery.

The process to update and manage content across three regional sites required unnecessary operational load and was costly in comparison to potential alternatives. Updating of content required developer involvement, which often created a bottleneck for the business’s 10+ content authors, as well as the ability to deliver campaigns quickly.

Moreover, the underlying architecture didn't support the client’s future roadmap, which included consistent style components across it’s platforms, as well as offering localised content for multiple languages.

The solution would need to allow the business to deliver 2000+ content pages, with consistent branding across three sites, support multi-language content, and be scalable across any other future channels, regions or applications.

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Collaboratively delivering a headless platform

Working alongside the client, we began a staged migration, decoupling legacy content modules from the old platform and migrating them to a new headless CMS iteratively. The first steps included understanding the future state solutions architecture and determining the best technology stacks to support this considerable undertaking, as well as whether a front-end infrastructure should be developed. After careful consideration, Contentful headless CMS and Vue Storefront were chosen as the optimal platforms.

A proof of concept was successfully delivered, which was integral for proper due diligence and to set the foundations for the remainder of the migration, including the working model between our teams, the client and other partner vendors.

Other considerations included the delivery of a mobile first solution to drive conversion and the development of a design language system (DLS) so that all components follow consistent styling. This has enabled consistent branding and user experience across all sites.

With this development, the jewellery brand can reduce operational costs and provide content authoring without reliance on development, delivering content seamlessly without interruption.