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Happiness in Every Click: Boden’s Digital Evolution

A Trusted Partnership between N & DS and Boden enables a Modern, Scalable eCommerce Platform on Shopify

At a glance

CLIENT

Boden

STRATEGIC PARTNER

  • Shopify

SERVICES

  • Engineering
  • Data & Analytics

INDUSTRY

  • Retail

As a retailer committed to designing clothes that put a smile on your face, Boden wanted to curate that same exciting experience for every customer when they shop online. Our partnership began in 2019 and has since grown — with N & DS becoming an integral technology partner, deeply involved in Boden’s strategic digital transformation. Together, we embarked on a journey to modernize Boden’s eCommerce platform using the power of Shopify. The result? A shopping experience that delights customers and provides the scale, reliability and performance the leading retailer requires.

STYLE MEETS INNOVATION

Bringing Boden’s eCommerce Vision to Life

Founded in 1991, Boden is renowned for its vibrant, classic fashion collections. From starting as a catalogue business to growing into a leading online retailer, the company focuses on women’s and children’s apparel, boasting a significant presence across the UK, US and Europe. With the surge in online demand post COVID, Boden knew it needed to modernize its existing website to enable a better customer experience and respond to the market at speed.

N & DS began collaborating with Boden in late 2019 when the retailer needed help in supporting its content management system. When Boden knew it was time to upgrade its custom-built website, the company turned to N & DS as its system integration partner to provide architectural expertise, solution development, design, testing and release management. 

Together, N & DS worked with Boden on a modernization effort — from initial discovery to final implementation — including:

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    Architectural design and data migration governance
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    Integration of new features (product and stock domains)
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    New data warehouse and new reporting suite
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    New returns application
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    Comprehensive quality assurance (functional, integration, E2E)
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    Cutover and data migration
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    Management of third-party partnerships and cutover activities

    After a detailed RFx process, Shopify was chosen as Boden’s new eCommerce platform due to its out-of-the-box functionality and integration capabilities. The hope for the new platform was to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for Boden’s direct sales channel, improve conversion rates and therefore customer experience, accelerate time-to-market for changes in the front-end user interface, and enhance productivity and business performance.  

    UNDERSTANDING KEY REQUIREMENTS

    Boden needed a modern eCommerce solution to enable its unique business capabilities, such as payment capture for order and dispatch, multi-warehouse fulfilment with flexible sourcing rules and backorder due date delay management. Additionally, the company had tightly coupled legacy components, which created complexity in data flows and data migration as well as service end-point creation.

    Boden needed to go-live with a Big Bang release across all its stores and markets simultaneously, instead of incrementally by region, due to the complexity of its fulfilment process. This meant that synchronization and prioritization were key in delivering each build component, as well as embracing agile ways of working and tight collaboration across N & DS, Boden and other third parties. 

    FROM VISION TO EXECUTION

    N & DS and Boden’s Strategic Partnership

    At the beginning of our journey as system integration partner, we started with discovery and design workshops — analyzing as-is business processes, capabilities, objectives and vision for stock and order and customer and marketing domains. This helped us form a baseline view of the architecture. Then, we delivered a comprehensive offering of 'as-is', 'to-be' and transitional views for both capabilities and technical components. This helped Boden understand the scope, complexities, risks and options impacted by various factors, such as time-to-market, business objectives, cost and overall business performance.

    From there, we developed solution blueprints, ensuring alignment with Boden's goals, and successfully secured approval from key stakeholders across all business functions. 

    By providing consistent support to business, data, cloud, systems/services and application teams (as well as external integration partners), we helped facilitate the design, development, testing and release of delivery components in an agile manner.

    With our data and analytics knowledge, we developed and documented the data loading process for customer and order entities, encompassing migrated data verification, metrics calculation and reporting. We also developed a comprehensive plan for data migration that included product, image, price, stock, customer and order information. For quality assurance, we performed various verification activities, including integration testing, end-to-end testing, performance testing and data validation.

    A NEW ERA FOR BODEN BEGINS

    The transition to the new eCommerce platform culminated in a seamless release in January 2025, highlighting the power of trusted collaboration. All legacy websites, along with their underlying back-end services, were effectively decommissioned and the successful rollout of the new Shopify stores across multiple markets — including the UK, US, Germany, Australia and Austria — was achieved with a Big Bang release. With the new modern solution, Boden is even better positioned to put smiles on every customer’s face…no matter where they shop. 

    RESULTS

    8%

    annual saving in cost to run eCommerce platform

    50%

    reduction in front-end development resources required to manage content due to the simplicity of Shopify

    HEAR FROM OUR CUSTOMER

    “This was an incredibly large and complex project with multiple streams of work that needed to deliver in parallel with many dependencies. Our N & DS team was exceptional —their diligence and attention to detail ensured we could deliver something very complex. We couldn’t have done it without them.” 

    Alexander Ives
    Senior Director of Technology, Boden

    TECH STACK 

    LEARN MORE

    Interested in discovering how we deliver exciting customer experiences in retail?