“Fast fashion is a very price sensitive market…It’s been a very fast-growth sector: we’ll bring in new products every single day”

This quote alone, from one of the UK’s biggest online fashion brands In The Style’s CTO Jon Cleaver, demonstrates why it was vital for them to build a remarkable mobile app. The app not only needed to reflect their reputation within the market, but also enable them to continue to compete in this merciless market as well as in the app store. Cleaver explains that the app Godel has built for In The Style is in line with their unique brand, helping them compete in the fashion e-commerce industry.

Before their partnership with Godel, In The Style had chosen an off-the-shelf platform for their app. It soon became clear to them that this wouldn’t help them to compete effectively in order to reach their goals. This platform was able to deal with the heavy traffic which experienced, but there was no way for them to take control of the app and be “in charge” of their own “destiny”.

Subsequently, In The Style set out on their quest to find a partner that would be able to deliver a custom application in time for the peak trading cyber period in November, which was at first a challenging task. None the less, Godel delivered –

“We had timing challenges… our peak trading period is November, and we agreed contract terms with Godel in April. We needed to build the app before November. We achieved that as a team which was fantastic.” John Cleaver further explains that the process was “pretty seamless”.

In The Style had considered a number of options when choosing Godel as their software development partner. Cleaver said, “We looked at mobile app-specific development agencies and we found a mix: whilst the work some had done was very impressive, the cost to market was so expensive that it wasn’t feasible for us. Also they weren’t in favour of the tech choices we wanted to make – they wanted to do it their way rather than ours. We wanted something sustainable that we could eventually bring in-house. We also looked at smaller boutique offerings – a lot of them were just so under-baked”

As a result In The Style made to decision to choose Godel as their partner – largely due to alignment between their and Godel’s values  with Cleaver explaining that “The general ethics of the business and the way they look after their engineers doesn’t feel like a sweatshop… The training they provide, their offices and facilities, were very good. Ethically they were very well-aligned.”

Not forgetting that the development needed completing prior to November’s notorious Black Friday event, the race was on to deliver not just an app, but a fantastic product that held its own, alongside the existing, successful In The Style website. Cleaver adds that he “felt like quality was very important to Godel”, and that he “felt like when we brought the product in house, there wouldn’t be any technical mess.”

Working closely with the client’s product owner and front-end development team, Godel dived into a sprint routine and built a cross-platform app that integrated seamlessly with In The Style’s backend platform.

“This probably saved about half the man-hours we had to put into the old app.”

Ultimately, the app would save around 50% of the time which the In The Style team was previously spending on maintenance and reporting. Once deployed, the app was met with positive reviews to the point where it climbed to the top three in the App Store, above many major retail brands.