Boden: A Decade of Partnership
DESCRIPTION
Boden is a leading British clothing brand that designs and sells clothing with a quintessentially British style that our customers say makes them smile. Starting in the UK 30 years ago with a growing base of customers in the UK, US and Germany, Boden is best known for conveying a certain joie-de-vivre through its product imagery.
Boden has always been a direct-to-consumer, catalogue-based business and is best known for having the ability to convey a story about lifestyle and what they’re about through the imagery of its product.
The Boden brand portrays a lifestyle that its customers aspire to – whether on holiday, dressing for an occasion, or just living everyday life.
CASE STUDY
Over the last 10 years, the world has evolved, and there’s now huge importance that a website, now one of the core tools consumers use to buy and sell, needs to work harder at selling to the customer. Boden partnered with Godel in 2014 to grow the team and technical capabilities whilst keeping the existing in-house Boden developers at their London HQ. Over the years, the Godel team has integrated into how Boden works.
“With the rate of change in the market, we decided continuing with just an in-house engineering capability wasn’t sustainable long term. We were introduced to Godel by people who had previously worked with nearshore partners. They knew the kind of talent and engineering skills Godel could provide and we were quickly convinced that this would work well for us too.” Marcus Liberman, Head of IT Operations
Boden needed to enhance their technology products to support market changes and how their systems support that. Since the partnership began in 2014, Godel has played a huge part in Boden’s e-commerce development journey.
The rate of market change meant Boden needed to remain at the forefront of how their systems operate and provide a seamless shopping journey for their customers. Godel has been working with Boden on several projects related to their main web application, cloud migration, and various development and support tasks.
GODEL PODS
Boden’s systems are constantly improving, which has been a collaborative effort between both teams. The partnership has grown to a point where the Godel team are confident in bringing their own ideas to the table for how Boden can make improvements. Godel has introduced and embraced technologies that Boden are using to manage incidents more dynamically which has made the team more self-sufficient
Boden now utilises the skills and capabilities of the Godel engineers, with the business being dependent on the skills and knowledge of domain expertise, and tech leadership from both sides. This has created effective, cross-collaboration between teams.
“A key attribute for our partnership is transparency. We’ve developed a good understanding of dealing with pressure and navigating that within our teams and how we can support each other. We have shared goals, expectations and milestones and the Godel team are always aware of what Boden is trying to achieve.” Marcus Liberman, Head of IT Operations
Keeping the core operating model going through substantial changes has been key to the partnership’s success. Boden and Godel overcoming challenges completely out of their control is a testament to the partnership’s strength. A good example of this would be COVID, where despite the turbulence, the teams never missed a beat and the teams stayed as united and transparent as possible.
Celebrating a decade of partnership, this case study celebrates a fully integrated partnership and how it has evolved to become one team.