MADE.com was a successful European e-commerce furniture store, raising £105M in VC funding. Style and design were at the core of MADE’s brand, driving the necessity for a flawless web, mobile and in-store digital experience.
The code base that had powered them for so long had become legacy, limiting their ability to deliver a seamless digital experience.
Made.com's Magento powered website had driven growth since their founding in 2010 and clever utilisation of a SaaS app platform had proven the value of a stand alone mobile app.
As the company evolved, their single tiered website struggled to scale and had difficulty adapting to their refreshed brand and customer focused ethos. The off-the-shelf mobile app offered limited customisation, was only available on the Apple app store, and couldn't support emerging technologies such as augmented reality.
MADE.com chose to partner with Theodo based on our in depth expertise of in React & React Native and our ability to deliver high fidelity digital products quickly.
Together the goals of the project were identified: release the mobile application before the busy Christmas period and train seven Made.com engineers in the new stack.
Whilst they had a talented in-house tech team, they didn't possess the experience in the technology stack to build the required web and mobile app, or a background in the agile methodology to implement best practices needed to lay the foundations for continued growth.
Theodo integrated into MADE.com’s development team and together they delivered the mobile, web and kiosk applications.
Two full-stack engineers and an Agile Coach were embedded in Made's tech team, under the direction of their Head of Product. With the two deliverables in mind, they first selected a key page on the website to migrate to React. By creating the equivalent page within the mobile application in parallel, they were able to validate that the code strategy provided maximum reuse, which would speed up development considerably. Sharing code between React & React Native enabled scalability of the application and the release of user focused features that would increase speed and convenience for the customer.
The mobile and web apps were ultimately delivered on schedule, with key stakeholders kept informed every step of the way.
Over the 8 month engagement, Theodo trained the team of 7 internal developers in the technologies and Agile methodology to ensure that MADE.com had the internal capability to scale & maintain the applications.
The Showroom kiosk was built in 4 weeks receiving over 130,000 visits in the first month and press coverage throughout Europe. With the success of the web and mobile applications, the code reusability offered by React and React Native frameworks presented the opportunity for more digital innovation. Within four weeks a custom application was developed for 65 inch touchscreen and placed in their showroom. This tied together the online and offline experiences and completed the omnichannel experience.
The attraction drew in over 130,000 visits in the first month and now finds itself replicated in Germany.
Developing with React and React Native, JavaScript frontend libraries maintained by Facebook meant only one codebase was needed for web, iOS and Android. This increased the development speed by 30% and also enabled the development team the ability to work on both the web and mobile platforms simultaneously.
A shared codebase between React and React Native made it possible to write the business logic and static typing once, and re-use it across the applications. The impact: faster delivery, a consistent customer experience and less surface for bugs across the 3 products.
Apollo GraphQL was used to create a flexible data layer that was accessible to the frontend team. This limited development requirements on the backend, helping to move away from Legacy code, whilst also improving site performance.
Node.js and Next.js were leveraged for server-side rendering which improved performance and page load time, thereby bolstering MADE.com’s SEO within a fiercely competitive space within the industry.
I was impressed with the technical and methodological training provided by the Theodo team. Not only did they allow us to launch our mobile and web app, but also enhanced our Showroom customer journey through an innovative touch screen experience while leaving us with a strong team to continue development going forward.
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