Whistles

The Foschini Group Limited (TFG) is the parent company of TFG London which runs a diverse portfolio of 29 retail brands globally and whose vision is to create remarkable omni-channel experiences for their customers.  

TFG London entered the UK market with the acquisition of the Phase Eight brand, Whistles, Hobbs, Damsel in a Dress and Inside Story, and are now some of the most successful, premium womenswear brands in the UK. 

The Commerce Team Global is proud to provide ongoing support and help TFG brands accelerate their growth internationally. 

Impact

  • Uplift in go to market development
  • Ongoing 24/7 support 
  • Increased site performance
  • Accelerated global expansion roadmap
  • 3rd party integrations for improved customer service
  • Improved UX & UI
  • Streamlined Asset Management 

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Brief

TFG approached The Commerce Team Global during a critical phase of their digital transformation and expansion of their 4 brands: Whistles, Hobbs, Phase Eight and Inside Story.  

We have been involved in providing comprehensive support for the client’s development roadmap which includes integrating with third-party technologies, delivering 24/7 platform support, and creating tailored storefronts to support global expansion into specific locales. Additionally, we focused on improving overall site performance, prioritising speed, scalability, and reliability to maximise conversion rates. 

Challenges

The TFG team faced several challenges in transforming the client’s digital operations: 

  • Legacy development cycles: Prolonged timeframes delayed feature releases, impacting the time-to-market.
  • Growing backlog: An ever-expanding list of unresolved tasks slowed down the development pipeline, leading to inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
  • Demand for agility: Operating in a fast-paced fashion retail environment necessitated rapid delivery of impactful changes while maintaining platform stability. 

Our Solution

To address these challenges, we’ve dedicated a Salesforce Commerce Cloud team of developers, and structured development into bi-weekly sprints, to maintain a steady rhythm of progress and deliver regular feature releases that bring immediate value to TFG’s key brands. Our iterative approach allowed TFG to go to market quickly, ensuring the platform evolves in step with industry trends. 

We worked with TFG to optimise backlog management, enhanced site functionality and performance. We improved the overall customer journey with faster page load times, seamless navigation, and localisation tailored to diverse global audiences.  

We currently provide continuous 24/7 support and roadmap development to the TFG portfolio and brands’ expansion, enhancing platform capabilities through 3rd party technologies. 

For Whistle, we integrated Cloudinary technology to improve site performance and streamline assets management, Adyen for payments processing and Global-E, an end-to-end platform that enables merchants to accelerate DTC cross-border ecommerce. We also redesigned their PDP for an improved UX and shopping experience and implemented KeyIVR that enables TFG's customer service team to process payments through the call centre in a PCI-compliant manner. 

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"The Commerce Team Global are very collaborative, when we switched over to Salesforce, we had the team come to our office to meet our team and to really see how we worked. They fitted into our schedule and helped us to launch our website on time with all the features that we wanted. We couldn’t be happier with the work that The Commerce Team has done for us."

Chris Tinsley, Group Head of Web Operations, TFG London

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