As a multinational online beauty retailer, Beauty Bay is continuously looking to innovate so it can improve its customer experience. When it realised the constraints of its IT systems were limiting its ability to please customers and grow at pace, it turned to BJSS.

Together, BJSS and Beauty Bay have improved the retailer's customer experience, enabled it to scale for growth, and provided the foundation for a shift to data-driven decision making across the organisation. The retailer can now process 65,000 orders in 40 minutes, and staff can search for available products in milliseconds.

Challenge

Beauty Bay serves a young demographic with high expectations. Its customers want a convenient and personalised shopping experience when acquiring the latest and most exclusive cosmetics and beauty products.

Beauty Bay wanted greater visibility of its operations and security so it could continue to satisfy these customers and remain competitive in a fast-moving market. It also wanted to support the company's ambitions to grow its audience and revenue and derive more value from the data it collects on customer behaviour.

Beauty Bay’s mission-critical order management system lacked scalability and reliability. When the retailer experienced peak traffic during the Christmas season, sales events, and product releases, its site could experience slowdowns or order delays, leading to disappointed customers.

Beauty Bay also couldn’t provide business leaders with easy access to up-to-date information about customers and market activity on which to base decisions.

“The methodology of running a discrete discovery phase before beginning work was new to some of my team. We benefited from observing and being part of the process.”

(Marcus Sims, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Beauty Bay)

Solution

BJSS led an AWS Well-Architected review of Beauty Bay’s infrastructure, covering the six pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation, and sustainability. The review highlighted the agility and breadth of experience in the Beauty Bay team while identifying areas of improvement.

BJSS helped Beauty Bay redesign its existing order management system to improve its ability to manage large volumes of online orders at peak times of the year. Together, they developed a new end-to-end architecture built on AWS to deal with traffic spikes and improve customer and staff experience. BJSS was engaged from discovery through delivery to completion.

BJSS developed Beauty Bay’s first foundational data platform with automated, end-to-end AWS data pipelines. The platform integrates real-time information from multiple sources and provides a single view of customer and business data. BJSS built the data platform using an everything-as-code approach by leveraging the AWS Code Development Kit.

“The new solutions we’ve developed with BJSS are powering better decision making and reducing operational risks. With a single view of the truth and a reliable, scalable platform, we have improved our service levels and can now focus on enhancing the customer experience.”

(Marcus Sims, Chief Technology Officer at Beauty Bay)

Benefits

Full assessment of infrastructure

The structured, methodical approach of the AWS Well-Architected review gave Beauty Bay an objective, external assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. BJSS provided a roadmap of remediation activities to address risks and outstanding issues.

Scalable order management system

Beauty Bay’s order management system can now scale quickly to changes in customer demand, thanks to a serverless architecture that ensures online sales occur swiftly and reliably, even during busy shopping times. Beauty Bay can manage peak order volumes, improve customer experience, and support international expansion that increases customer numbers. It saw the following results:

  • Finished the project on time and within budget.
  • Reduced order processing time: 65,000 orders in 40 minutes, compared to hours on the previous system.
  • Developed a stock monitoring system with exposed APIs that shortens the time it takes staff to look up products to fulfill orders. Items appear in seconds compared to minutes previously.
  • Integrated the Gnatta Customer Services portal for improved security.
  • Created a new processing engine that improved ease of use for customer service teams and reduced the number of manual interventions.
  • Expanded testing capabilities for Beauty Bay IT teams, improving the accuracy and reliability of data used in customer orders.

Data-driven culture

BJSS supported Beauty Bay’s shift towards a data-driven culture. Its business leaders now have easy access to real-time information from its data lake, helping them make better decisions. Among the results:

  • Employees have up-to-date customer and business data, accessible via mobile or web interfaces. Before working with BJSS, Beauty Bay provided business leaders with data refreshes once a day, which wasn’t frequent enough.
  • Smarter data reporting using AWS QuickSight and machine learning-driven forecasting gives staff greater insights into the business. This means Beauty Bay can focus on improving customer experience and processes.
  • Serverless architecture reduces ongoing IT costs by cutting down the time spent on maintenance tasks and the spend on unused compute resources.
  • The system is more flexible and quicker to deploy too, increasing opportunities for innovation.
  • A new margin detection system ensures that employees are alerted to any anomalies in product margins so they can take immediate and appropriate actions.

Security and compliance

BJSS has ensured that the Beauty Bay infrastructure is secure. All customer and business data is protected by encryption and compliant with all regulations.

Tangible documentation

BJSS converted tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge using its Service Blueprint methodology, and other Business Analysis approaches. This supports Beauty Bay’s scalability by making knowledge more transferrable and accessible.

“We now have the elasticity to support high traffic and to reduce compute capacity to lower levels during slow periods to manage our cost base effectively.”

(Marcus Sims, Chief Technology Officer at Beauty Bay)