Working together as partners, Gradient Edge and Profound helped Interflora select an appropriate architecture, a new technology suite and implement a design system.

With Gradient Edge leading the architecture and technology implementation and Profound leading the customer and user experience delivery, Interflora’s three ecommerce sites were re-platformed and launched in just nine months.

Interflora UK operates three consumer facing websites and a telesales operation. Two of these sites were based upon a custom-built Perl platform that was at end-of-life, and one site was on a Java based platform - they all needed to harmonise into a single modern platform.

The old, constrained architecture meant the associated hosting costs were very expensive maintaining year-round high availability to accommodate just 3 peak traffic spikes. In addition to the tech requirements the Interflora team had several business requirements.

These included:

Folding their internal designers & developers into the delivery of the transformation to make sure they could own the stack once live.

• Helping up-skill the team on the different technology as it was delivered.
• Creating a design system to accelerate future development.

The initial thought was to adopt a DXP, however, the team realised to future-proof their customer experience ambitions they needed unfettered freedom on the front-end user experience and an ability to instantly serve multiple channels. After a discovery process it was clear a cloud-native composable architecture would mean they could rapidly adapt to any channel or device to best deliver the right customer experience.

On the technology side, selection exercises were run to determine the optimum product stack for Interflora, aligning with MACH architecture principles. As part of this process, Gradient Edge were able to leverage their Keystone composable commerce platform accelerator to quickly run a pilot to prove the technology choices, demonstrate how the best-of-breed product selections could integrate together via a GraphQL aggregation layer, then validate key design decisions such as how to incorporate personalisation and business page management. The finalised tech stack included Gartner-rated leading platforms - commercetools for ecommerce, Algolia for search, Amplience for CMS and Pimberly for PIM - all integrated via cloud-native approaches on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

The Pilot then provided the foundation for an accelerated build out with a Beta Release possible after just 3 months to enable early user testing and feedback.

Gradient Edge, Profound and the team at Interflora, came together under an agile framework to launch all three sites in just 9 months from start to finish. The project, delivered on time and in budget, has delivered a next-generation digital estate and a strong internal capability to evolve the platform. In particular, the business has seen the following improvements:

• 20% reduction in annual hosting costs, moving from in house hosted solution to a multi-site, multi-tenancy SaaS offering
• Ability to benefit from ongoing new functionality delivered by SaaS vendors
• Release frequency improved to fortnightly sprint releases
• Creating a design system to accelerate future development
• Agility to deploy key changes in hours (if necessary) with a modern DevOps system
• Massively improved ability to cope with increased site load and to fly through peaks, with high performance static site generated pages and single page app approach.
• Improved robustness with zero downtime since launch across all 3 x sites
• Ability to more easily launch and optimise campaigns
• Improved SEO
• Extensive knowledge transfer across the business and in-house engineering teams that has enabled Interflora self-sufficiency on the new platform