frasers group:
elevating sports direct to a future-ready platform

sports direct - phone on a run track

the
challenge

As Frasers Group has grown over the years, with online revenues exceeding £1bn, it has increasingly encountered challenges to innovate the proprietary in-house commerce platform, which serves multiple businesses and brands, across multiple geographic regions. To address the challenge of reducing time to market, Frasers Group engaged Lab Digital to help meet key business challenges:

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Respond faster to customer trends and contribute to the business agility by reducing the time to market for features, products, prices, promotions, and content.

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Elevate the customer experience in look & feel, speed, and improve accessibility with translated local websites to help the brands on their global digital journey.

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Equip Sports Direct and the rest of the Frasers Group with a composable commerce platform that is ready for the challenges of the rapidly changing e-commerce landscape globally.

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our
approach


  • Leveraging best in class technology and capabilities using composable platforms.

  • Enabling a new organisational structure by reorganising from engineering-led to customer-focused product teams.

  • Creating a long-term partnership with blended teams across the Frasers Group, Lab Digital, and a mix of other suppliers.

outcomes

 

headless CMS

Allowing hands-on content management via a headless CMS, powering storefronts and more later, makes life for content marketing much easier.

updates

Content, products, prices, and promotions can be updated in minutes instead of overnight.

cloud hosting

Data streaming and consolidating a scattered on-premises data landscape to a cloud hosted platform.

openAI

Machine translations via a translation service, powered by OpenAI, costing a fractions of cents per product while being much faster and cost effective compared to commercial SaaS translation services.

no downtime

Deployments are possible without downtime and as much as you want, due to a robust pipeline and (test)automation.

reducing errors

Infrastructure as code reducing errors and improve consistency.

vercel

Vercel hosting for a next level CDN, feature environments and business acceptance testing, speeding up collaboration greatly.

 

 

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working together

We’ve set up an organisation where teams were mixed with Frasers Group developers, to help them onboard in a future platform with modern technologies and program languages. When it was time to scale up, other agencies have been involved into growing the teams even further.

By organising mixed teams around customer journeys, as well as a platform team supporting the data and bridge to the legacy landscape; we can: create focus for each team with a shared roadmap. By having more of a product mindset, involving business besides IT, we are an example for Business-IT alignment within the Frasers organisation.

technology
& partners

At the core of the platform are commercetools as the eCommerce engine, Amplience as the CMS (Content Management System), and Algolia for search and merchandising capabilities. This is managed and coordinated by Lab Digital’s MACH Composer framework. MACH technologies allowed us to select best-in-class vendors to meet the objectives of business users, and by engaging fully with our partners we have delivered truly composable commerce and a solid foundation for future expansion.


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Composable doesn't have to be complicated.

We create composable solutions to manage the complex challenges of modern digital businesses like yours.

To find out how we can help you, get in touch for a no-strings chat, and someone from our team will contact you as soon as possible.

about
frasers group

Frasers Group started as a small store in Maidenhead in 1982 and from there, grew to become a global powerhouse. As the business evolved, 2019 saw the rebrand of Sports Direct International to Frasers Group plc; a reflection of the Groups growth and change in market identity.

Led by Chief Executive Michael Murray, the business is set on a formidable upwards trajectory as it continues to expand with its pioneering approach to retail. Frasers Group provides consumers with access to the world’s best Sports, Premium and Luxury brands with a vision to build the planet's most admired and compelling brand ecosystem.

As a leader in the industry, Frasers Group is committed to rethinking retail by driving digital innovation and providing unique store experiences to its consumers globally.