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Burberry chooses headless CMS to enable speed and agility

Burberry, a world-renowned British luxury fashion house, underwent an extensive digital transformation across an array of platforms. After assessing the market, they knew they wanted to adopt a composable strategy and needed an agile headless CMS to make the transition confidently.

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40
developer tickets per week reduced to one
80%
increase in speed of translation
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Burberry employs more than 9,000 people worldwide. It is ranked 97th in the current “Interbrand's Best Global Brands” report. It has stores in 59 countries, and a brand value in excess of $5 billion. It is known for a distinctly British attitude and continual innovation.

Burberry leverages technology throughout international markets to deliver premium digital experiences. The brand has pioneered multichannel commerce in the fashion space, selling products through both directly operated and franchised stores, as well as via wholesale partners and online.

To inspire and excite both existing and prospective customers, the Burberry marketing and communications teams create distinctive, meaningful content and luxury experiences that span websites in 11 languages. For the past three years, the Contentstack headless content management system (CMS) has been at the heart of these experiences.

Creating content is quicker and easier with Contentstack. It’s a user-friendly tool making training and onboarding simpler. The integration with our translation and media systems means content can be created and published much quicker than before. The flexible, reuseable components allow us to complete new designs briefs without the need for constant development

Sonia Latoracca | Digital Commerce Content Manager, Burberry

The challenge

In the fast-paced world of fashion and luxury goods, Burberry has undergone extensive digital transformation across an array of platforms. Faced with the demands of multiple collections, extensive translation requirements and a need to deliver high-performing experiences to discerning customers, the limitations of Burberry’s legacy, monolithic content management and e-commerce platform became apparent.

This was seen most clearly in slow time to market and a failure to reflect the brand values of creativity and innovation. This led to an inability to deliver the quality of experience befitting of the Burberry brand, at pace and scale, throughout web, mobile and other channels and across multiple locales and languages.

As a strategic response to this issue, Burberry chose a MACH (microservices, API, cloudnative and headless)-based strategy to guide e-commerce and personalization technology investment. A composable approach enables speed and agility in responding to new market opportunities. Following a thorough review of the market, Contentstack was selected as the CMS component of this digital transformation.

Contentstack was picked based on its ease of language management and integrations, and the advantages of a truly headless architecture.

As a MACH-certified solution, Contentstack integrates seamlessly with Smartling to enable comprehensive translation, alongside commercetools, the e-commerce platform chosen by Burberry.

Contentstack offers intuitive use for editors, reducing the time necessary to train and be effective in their role from days to a matter of minutes. Contentstack improves the productivity of these teams by allowing them to curate, update, preview and publish content rapidly. This is achieved with powerful workflow processes, augmented by rigorous roles and permissions capabilities.

Contentstack was also chosen based on the unique live preview feature. This enables Burberry to preview content across multiple channels before saving or publishing it live. The ability to edit entries and preview these changes in real-time not only ensures consistency and quality

but also frees the Burberry content creation team from developer delays when it comes to updating material.

Contentstack was implemented by system integrator and partner EPAM and is now used throughout Burberry.

The impact

Contentstack CMS has accelerated content creation for international markets across multiple languages. Burberry is now able to create global desktop and mobile sites for each country and bulk publish in up to 50 languages.

This speed has gone hand-in-hand with improved service to the content creation staff. Calls to the development team have reduced drastically from more than 40 user tickets a week to fewer than one.

The evolution of the translation capabilities has been a key element of this reduced burden on the helpdesk, and the consequent improvements in agility and speed. Translation work is now 80% quicker compared to the previous CMS.

With regards to impact on productivity and output the Contentstack system has enabled Burberry to deliver relevant content to story-telling and landing pages faster and more accurately across global websites in 11 languages.

“Contentstack helps our engineers to move fast and concentrate on business requirements by reducing proprietary platform inconveniences,” said Sonia Latoracca, digital commerce content manager at Burberry. “Adding new consumers has never been such an easy and pleasant journey for everyone.”

The conclusion

“Creating content is quicker and easier with Contentstack,” Latoracca said. “It’s a user friendly tool making training and onboarding simpler. The integration with our translation and media systems means content can be created and published much quicker than before. The flexible, reuseable components allow us to complete new designs briefs without the need for constant development.”

Contentstack has enabled Burberry to create and publish content faster and more accurately through its integration functionality with other tools in Burberry’s ecosystem. With this technology, Burberry has the agility to stay at the forefront of changing trends and seize opportunities for growth.

The results

  • Forty developer tickets a week reduced to one
  • An 80% increase in publishing speed and enhanced flexibility in landing page design and style.

Company

Established in 1856, with its first shop opened in 1891, Burberry is a world-renowned British luxury fashion house headquartered in London, England. It designs and distributes ready-to-wear clothing and accessories, including leather goods, footwear, eyewear, fragrances, cosmetics and its iconic trench coats.

Industry

Luxury

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