The White Company has described its migration to the cloud in order to prepare for peak trading later this year.
The retailer partnered with The Retail Cloud Team, a Piksel company, to migrate, host and manage its eCommerce business, ensuring it is scalable for peak trading as well as its efforts to grow internationally.
The While Company first re-platformed its eCommerce site onto SAP Hybris last year, but faced difficulties finding a supplier to host and fully manage the service.
Turning to The Retail Cloud Team, The White Company was finally able to take to the cloud by migrating its £100 million business onto its platform earlier this year.
Talking to Essential Retail, Phil Burnett, IT director at The White Company, said: “As a business, we’re pretty unique – 20 years ago it was a catalogue business and then it moved to a website business and has opened stores turning over £200 million a year, and this is split 50/50 between stores and the direct selling platform – where most retailers sell between 10-20% online.”
He added: “It is massively important, particularly over peak, to have a reliable and stable performance. Because hosting on physical tin – you couldn’t account for the size of scaling. So you massively over invest for one real week in the year when it goes absolutely berserk or you don’t invest and cross your fingers and hope the entire the infrastructure will stand up.”
Peter Sharples, GM at The Retail Cloud Team, added: “The advanced flexibility and capability of public cloud systems is essential for growing retailers looking to future-proof their eCommerce platforms. Retailers look for IT partners that understand their unique size and requirements. As such we produce bespoke products that are agile enough to be tailored to the individual needs of the business.”
Burnett believes the hardest task is now behind the business. “We’re in a more luxurious position as we go into peak and as we grow the business, and grow it outside the UK,” he said.
“We have a new CEO from Topshop and we are much better prepared and set up to make sure the business grows and diversifies.”
He said the company is looking forward to the upcoming peak period and is more confident there will be zero issues with online trading.
“The concerns we had in the past in every area of the business are no longer going to be there and moving forward we have a better platform to grow the business.”