Guardian and Mannings are two of Asia’s leading Health & Beauty retailers, and in fast-paced Asian markets a leading ecommerce offering is paramount to stay ahead.
Building on the strategic vision and blueprint we established as partners of Dairy Farm, we worked on redesigning Hybris out of the box capabilities to rapidly launch a scalable, repeatable ecommerce experience as well as redesigning the organisation to continue to deliver digital products at pace.
The first step in a digital transformation is defining the digital north star; a long term point of orientation and a shared goal for the entire organisation. Working as strategic advisors to the CDO, we helped to define the group digital strategy, technology architecture, and operating and deployment model across all Health & Beauty brands and markets. Through a combination of market, industry and competitor research, digital persona creation and stakeholder interviews and engagements, we laid out the digital customer value proposition.
In a fast-moving market, it was important to get to market without delay, but the foundation phase is pivotal to ensuring the business is set to scale. Our foundational launch would be just that, a minimum viable product to be continually enhanced to keep delivering incremental customer and commercial benefit. Starting with domestic ecommerce for Singapore and Hong Kong, we set the base for other markets to join.
Identifying the need to scale at speed, our approach was to launch the first product using as much as possible from Hybris' out-of-the-box ecommerce offering with minimal customisation. This pragmatic decision allowed us to deliver a fully operational product at speed, moving into continuous improvement following the initial launches at the end of 2019 and early 2020.
With our team driving the user experience and user interface design of the flagship websites we worked in close collaboration with Dairy Farm's internal Product and Marketing teams in both Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as their third-party Technology partner. With the team on the ground, we led multi-partner working sessions ensuring all teams had a seat at the table. Management and oversight over multiple parties required open communications, a flexible approach and sharp attention to detail to ensure everything came together.