Affordable prêt-à-porter fashion for women – the Promod brand has stood for this promise since it was founded in 1975 by Francis-Charles Pollet. The company, headquartered in the heart of the textile industry in the North of France, Marcq-en-Barœul, is now represented by almost 600 stores in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Malta and French overseas territories.
Promod launched its first online shop in 1996, making it one of the pioneers of eCommerce in France. By 2025, eCommerce sales are expected to triple. In addition, the company cultivates relationships with online customers via its community website, You Make Promod, which regularly offers challenges for 30,000+ subscribers to co-style and co-create new trendy patterns, share ideas and test shopping experiences.
Made-to-measure: Composable commerce for Promod
With the previous eCommerce platform, an outdated, monolithic solution, expressing the brand’s uniqueness with off-the-shelf software became increasingly difficult. At the beginning of 2021, Promod favored a composable eCommerce model, which combines commercially available software and in-house developments. With this best-of-breed strategy, Promod can easily integrate the ideal functions and tools that have been specifically developed as the foundation for made-to-measure customer experiences.
With its modular structure, commercetools fits very well into our best-of-breed strategy. In fact, we were not looking for a monolith, but for a solution that would allow us to integrate existing modules developed in-house.
CIO, Promod
Tool by tool to the new look
At the start of the eCommerce migration project in early 2021, the Promod team decided to combine solutions from the MACH Alliance portfolio. Contentstack was chosen for the CMS tool, enabling the company to create more frontend possibilities to express its unique brand. At the same time, the checkout process of the online shop is powered by commercetools Composable Commerce, and in-house developments take care of the website’s remaining functions. The implementation was completed by the global digital agency Valtech. The site was relaunched in 2021.
So far we are very satisfied with the stability of the platform and its resilience. The first numbers are encouraging, especially considering that our focus has been on the technical redesign. Now we can fully exploit the possibilities of our new tools!
CIO, Promod
Make a wish: the next steps
Further deployments are carried out step by step. Next on the agenda is integrating new functions, such as introducing a wish list, new payment methods and customization options across the customer journey.
The transition to this type of architecture requires a lot of care and a fairly precise partitioning of the information system. Therefore, the architects should be involved throughout the implementation process of such a solution to take full advantage of its benefits.
CIO, Promod
When defining the roadmap, there was real teamwork between IT management and the Professional Services Team at commercetools. Thanks to this close cooperation, the Promod team has the opportunity to get familiar with the new tools and their possibilities during implementation – and beyond.
Read the Promod customer story to learn more about the fashion retailer’s digital commerce transformation or get to know how commercetools Composable Commerce for fashion enables brands to tailor customer experiences in this highly competitive market.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.