“Transformation is not just about implementing new technology. It’s about aligning strategy, operations, and customer needs to create sustainable value” – this quote, taken from a recent article by our Head of Global Advisory practice, perfectly summarises our focus as we partnered with one of the largest and leading luxury fashion retailers on its transformation journey.

As you would expect, this client had bold ambitions to elevate their digital experience, connect with customers, and provide a truly engaging and innovative journey, amplifying the brand and share of the growing luxury market. However, technology and an aging monolithic platform was holding back business growth, with a highly customised and complex platform requiring development for any small change, preventing the business from driving change at pace, and meeting the needs of its customers.

The client had previously spent almost 2.5 years attempting to re-platform its technology stack, component by component, but progress was slow. With a technology roadmap separate to and not aligned with the business needs, this dis-jointed approach soon highlighted the importance and need for a clear vision and strategic direction for teams to work towards, bringing together both technology and business priorities and accelerating the transformation journey.

We recommended a new approach to pivot the transformation focus to be customer value led, aligned to a clear set of business priorities, enabling the client to build scalable capabilities at pace and unlock business value fast.

A Clear Transformation Vision

We knew the immediate priority was to ensure we had a clear transformation vision and a precise and impactful strategy, considering both the customer needs and technical direction.

Taking a data led and customer centric approach, we started by facilitating focused sessions with the client, to ensure a common understanding of the customer and business needs. These covered areas such as:

• Market & competitor analysis – sharing insights, trends and innovation within the luxury fashion retail space, to keep a focus on the future and how this client can continue to lead the way.

• Customer journey mapping – to align on the customer perspective, potential friction points as well as future opportunities. Using various data inputs here such as traffic sources, funnel metrics, performance data, customer feedback and UX insights was key to ensure we had as complete view as possible.

• Capability mapping – an exercise to map core capabilities that the client required, existing challenges and future optimisations.

Armed with these insights and inputs, we ran interactive and collaborative workshops with the Senior Leadership team representing the business and technology teams, and together defined:

1. The key goals for the transformation and the KPIs that we would monitor in order to measure the impact. Given our upfront work understanding the existing performance data, we had a clear view of the baseline for our KPIs and could calculate potential uplifts.

2. A joined-up strategy for the approach, determining a prioritised view of business capabilities and technology enablers to give a clear direction and sequence based on business value. Having both business and technical representatives working together, and having the data and context to hand, meant we could positively challenge and facilitate what at times can be more difficult discussions in terms of aligning scope and priorities.

The Results: Transformation Clarity & Pace

With these two important outcomes; a clear set of goals and clarity on how we would measure success, along with an aligned strategy and single prioritised view of scope and capabilities, the client was then able to;

1. Articulate and communicate consistently the vision, goals and what success looks like for the transformation. With this clarity on direction, the client was then more able to keep laser focus only on activities that drive towards it.

2. Embed a culture of shared accountability and ownership of the strategic goals, providing a sense of purpose and engagement.

3. Unify the focus to ensure that all teams are pulling in the right direction, against a single view of priorities.

4. Continually evaluate and monitor progress and speed up decision making as everything linked back to a clear goal and KPI to measure impact.

Stepping Beyond Technology Change

Now whilst reading this summary, it probably all sounds a simple and a smooth process, but of course things are never that easy! Amongst all of this there was a lot of complexity to manage and challenging conversations to align everyone on the right actions to firstly protect the customer experience, drive business value and revenues and balance the challenging technical constraints and needs also.

However, what we demonstrated through this process was that this wasn’t simply about transforming the technology, but rather about re-shaping how technology, customer insight, and business strategy converge to unlock value. By aligning teams under a shared vision, defining clear priorities, and placing the customer at the heart of decision-making, we helped turn complexity into momentum; laying the foundation for sustainable digital growth in the ever-evolving world of luxury retail.

Unlocking Strategy for Your Business

We know that the first step of transformation can be a challenge, a barrier between you and what transformation can unlock for your business. Finding the right partner to guide and advise you along your transformation journey can make all the difference when it comes to demystifying the path you need to take. To find out more about our Advisory offering at Lean Tree, visit our Strategy and Transformation page.