Mystery Client.

CMS strategy for a leading actor within the global market.

This client is one of the largest retailers within their business on the global market, with stores in 34 different countries. The client is forward thinking, and promoting innovation through unconventional means, organizational structures and initiatives.

We have been working together with this client for quite a while now, and have a great working relationship. We got the the opportunity to create something we're truly proud of, but it's hard to share fully due to an NDA. With their permission we have been allowed to share most parts of this project, but without disclosing the company name.

Challenge

As our client has grown and added new divisions and markets within its organization, all content (and believe us, there is a lot of it) have been spread throughout various different platforms used within the company. How could we find a way to manage all content so that it can be used on all of their multiple platforms?

Solution

Given our clients mostly autonomous departments (that all use their own platforms and processes) and the fact that this solution was to roll out on a by-project basis, we quickly realized that we couldn't plan ahead in the same way you usually do with CMS work. In our client's case, they needed a highly scalable content platform that allowed an agile method for efficient continuous development. We had to be able to extend to new ways of working without any hassle. We tested several different approaches with various PoC solutions in different use cases until we found the right sweet spot between flexibility and ease of use.

Contentful was the selected solution, and it neatly fit into a microservice architecture that allowed the headless flexibility our client needed. Since we didn't know what solutions the next department in line would need, we figured that the best thing to do was to prepare for all of them. In collaboration with Contentful we made sure to make this a reality.

But for this to work we couldn't focus on only delivering great technology - we had to take it to an organizational level. Together with our client and a couple of their departments we started mapping out and deriving the most common working methods, looking for a process that could easily be adapted and slotted in to the current ways of working with as little friction as possible.

Once the processes had been developed and the migration job was done, a backoffice was built to make the content editors day-to-day work as easy as possible.

Result

With our highly adaptable take on the structure of the Contentful platform, our client now has one place in which all of their content can be handled and distributed throughout all their different departments, channels and devices, regardless of their internal processes.

This was also the first time we got the chance to collaborate with Contentful which was a very good and developing experience for us.