Boohoo Group launches new websites for former Arcadia brands

Boohoo Group has launched new websites for its recently acquired former Arcadia brands – Burton, Dorothy Perkins and Wallis – in partnership with Astound Commerce.

The brands were purchased from administrator Deloitte in February 2021 for £25.2m following the collapse of Arcadia at the end of November 2020. Boohoo announced it would be relaunching the businesses as digital-only brands.

A tight deadline was set for the relaunch and Astound was charged with creating a scalable platform capable of supporting the fast growing group's expansion and integration goals. Central to this agility was Astound's custom "Reference Application", which allows multiple brands and locations to leverage the central code base.

This code base means that Boohoo can launch new sites swiftly; typically new brands and locales can be launched in weeks rather than months or years. As sites are relying on the same core code base, support and new feature enhancement now runs more efficiently, "to allow seamless implementation at speed".

Boohoo Group has rapidly expanded through acquisition having acquired Warehouse, Oasis, Debenhams and the former Arcadia brands within the space of a year. Its brand portfolio already included Boohoo, BoohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, Nasty Gal, Miss Pap, Karen Millen and Coast.

With multiple brands, this approach to the code base offers the group a "huge degree of agility" in its go-to-market approach and significant deployment efficiencies, explained Laura McKellar, Head of Technology – Digital, Online Innovation & Marketing at Boohoo.

“Our business requires us to adapt to the constantly shifting needs of its customers whilst staying competitive in a growing market. All too often technology can be the main bottleneck to growth.

"Our partnership with Astound has been crucial to our ability to achieve the pace required to keep up with its ever-evolving business needs, as evidenced by the speed and agility with which we have collaboratively launched these three new sites," McKellar said.

Astound Commerce designed and delivered the solution, implementing Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and integrating third-party technology, including customer data platform, Exponea (recently acquired by Bloomreach), to enable connected customer experiences and Apple Pay and PayPal to provide frictionless payments and deliver an optimised customer experience on the new platform.

Terry Hunter, CEO of Astound Commerce, commented: “In today’s volatile trading conditions, the Astound commitment to scaling up to meet the needs of our clients is more important than ever - allowing our partners to achieve the pace and agility required to keep up with their ever-evolving business needs.  I’m incredibly proud of the Astound Commerce UK boohoo team who delivered an epic turnaround for this project without sacrificing any of the quality or exceptional customer experience.”