GANT Australia

Anna Mansour

Commercial Manager, Salco Group Pty. Ltd.

Introduction

GANT is an internationally renowned fashion brand driven by a simple idea: Never Stop Learning. It’s a belief that has guided GANT since 1949, when Bernard Gantmacher founded a shirt-making company in the college town of New Haven, Connecticut.

GANT, headquartered in Sweden, with 21 international websites and a retail presence that spans the globe, made the decision to create an Australian web presence and Pipelabs, with experience in Shopify, AP21 and other necessary technologies, was chosen to make the new web platform a reality.

With a hard launch goal (be ready, tested and soft-launched well before Black Friday!) and the need for flexible, responsive and reliable integrations with systems like Apparel 21, the project was always going to be complex, interesting and rewarding for the team.

The Challenge

Launch GANT's new Australian eCommerce presence on Shopify, with a high-availability integration with AP21 for stock, product and refund/returns management (this integration suite was later productised as the Pipelabs ShopConnect app) alongside a number of other integrations and services.

Our Approach

Pipelabs has a strong focus on ensuring that we keep the user at the centre of our projects - a web platform can be functional, well-integrated and impeccably coded and will ultimately fail if the end user is unable to effectively achieve their goals.

With this approach in mind and a strong eye on ensuring that GANT's global guidelines were adhered to, we created an online presence that took that best of Shopify and married it with integrations with AP21 and other systems while also ensuring that a beautiful, enjoyable user experience was front of mind.

Pipelabs is an agile team and we used a sprint-based approach for this project, with a view to two week sprints and regular check-ins with the GANT team to ensure that we were in the right space and that all project goals were aligned.

Our approach allowed us to work through some fairly complex integrations with AP21, PoS and other systems and to ensure that we had best-in-class infrastructure and fault management in place.

For the platform, React and Node.js were the right technologies to allow us to customise the areas where Shopify couldn't provide the right interfaces for GANT's global style guides and to ensure that the user experience was at the level we wanted it to be.

The Result

Launching two weeks before the Black Friday sales were due to begin, we went through a rigorous process of testing the integration(s) between the Shopify platform and the Apparel21 ERP to ensure that all edge cases for stock management were handled correctly and that the platform and infrastructure was fast, easy-to-use and handled load well.

Both Salco and GANT Global love the site and have been very impressed with the platform and its flexibility and scalability, sales have exceeded expectations and continue to increase.

Pipelabs continues to work with Salco to grow both the GANT and Jeff Banks Shopify eCommerce stores.