Ganni
Global growth success

GANNI sets the bar for what retail is. They offer an ideal buying experience and unified commerce features such as endless aisles, ship from store, and click & collect. The solution is built with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Microsoft Azure  and a ’next generation’ Order Management System (Newstore). With this solution, GANNI has established themselves in the US and expanded from 10 to 30 markets in record time.

A new web shop for GANNI in the US set off the collaboration between IMPACT and GANNI. This led to a UX Customer Journey workshop and a roadmap for where GANNI wanted to go. The objective was to deliver on a visionary goal to be able to create omni-channel shopping experiences through stores using the latest digital possibilities such as magic hangers and facial recognition, and a matching digital space supported by a more data-driven customer approach.

It quickly became clear that the existing technological infrastructure was not strong enough to support the ambitions. The options for creating omni-channel experiences were limited, and GANNI did not get real insight into the customer behaviour through data.

Nicolaj Reffstrup, the founder of GANNI, has long had a vision for the company of moving from being a fashion company doing tech to being a tech company doing fashion, and this became the headline of the next phase: a digital strategy project which would result in, among other things, a new architectural blueprint able to support the main pillars of the ambition: to increase direct customer sales – online and in own stores, to develop a state-of-the-art tech infrastructure and to create a foundation for getting advanced customer insight based on data. The design of the digital space was to be developed by the agency Sorthvid.

Strategy processes can be time-consuming, but quick progress was important, and IMPACT and GANNI therefore chose to drive the strategy process in the same way as an agile IT project. The new infrastructure was to be defined in a four-week sprint to make it clear what was necessary to achieve the ambition. Furthermore, the work was to be the basis for the choice of a new OMS supplier. Workshops were held for all affected teams within retail, supply chain and commerce, and a list of suppliers was drawn up showing and evaluating different options. Workshops were also carried out with select suppliers, and after four weeks, we had blueprints and answers to the most essential questions asked: what should the system look like, which solution collaborations should be established, which KPIs should we measure, which resources are required, and how should we organise it all? All recommendations were gathered in a roadmap for the project, which has worked as the starting point for the subsequent implementation.

A fundamental solution design choice was whether the OMS system should be the solution engine and be integrated directly with miscellaneous front-end applications such as SalesForce Commerce Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Marketplaces, or whether an API layer should be added to the solution to provide agility and less supplier dependence, but also resulting in slightly increased costs and development complexity. GANNI chose the API approach to enable continuous execution on the strategy to be a technological frontrunner.

A next-generation Omnichannel OMS & POS (NewStore) was chosen because it is born omni-channel with features like endless aisles, ship from store and click & collect. This enables a holistic customer experience across online and offline with a minimum of channel friction. This for example means that a customer can research online and then visit a store – and if the desired product is not available at the store, it will be procured from elsewhere and shipped to the customer.

NewStore provides Omnichannel-as-a-Service with the first platform combining mobile POS, an omnichannel order broker, and inventory management. Store operations from endless aisle to mobile checkout to fulfillment are executed on intuitive mobile apps, creating a joyful shopping experience for the consumer and associate alike.

The strategy implementation is in full swing, and GANNI are on track according to their roadmap.