Delivering Web & Mobile Apps Faster With a Flexible Engineering Team
MADE.com is a successful European e-commerce furniture store, raising $137M VC funding so far. Style and design are at the core of MADE’s brand, driving the necessity for a flawless web, mobile and in-store digital experience.
The code base that had powered them for so long had become legacy, limiting their ability to deliver a seamless digital experience. MADE.com's Magento powered website had driven growth since their founding in 2010 and clever utilization of a SaaS app platform had proven the value of a stand-alone mobile app.
As the company evolved, their single tiered website struggled to scale and had difficulty adapting to their brand refresh and customer focused ethos. The off-the-shelf mobile app offered limited customization, was only available on the Apple app store, and couldn't support emerging technologies, such as augmented reality.
MADE.com chose to partner with Theodo based on their in-depth expertise in React and React Native and their ability to deliver high fidelity digital products within a short amount of time. Together the goals of the project were identified: release the mobile application before the busy Christmas period and train six MADE engineers in the new stack.
While they had a talented in-house tech team, they didn't possess the experience in the technology stack to build the required web and mobile app, or agile methodology to implement best practices needed to lay the foundations for continued growth.
Theodo integrated into MADE.com’s development team and together they delivered the mobile, web and kiosk applications. Two full-stack engineers and an agile coach were embedded in MADE's tech team, under the direction of their Head of Product. With the two deliverables in mind, we first selected a key page on the website to migrate to React. By creating the equivalent page within the mobile application in parallel, they were able to validate that the code strategy provided maximum reuse, which would speed up development considerably. Sharing code between React and React Native enabled scalability of the application and the release of user-focused features that would increase the speed and convenience for the customer.
Director of Engineering
Director of Engineering
The mobile and web apps were ultimately delivered on schedule, with key stakeholders kept informed every step of the way. Over the 8 month engagement, Theodo trained the team of 7 internal developers in the technologies and agile methodology to ensure that MADE.com had the internal capability to scale and maintain the applications.
With the success of the web and mobile applications, the code reusability offered by React and React Native frameworks presented the opportunity for more digital innovation. Within four weeks, a custom application was developed for 65-inch touchscreen, placed in their showroom, tying together the online and offline experiences - completing the omnichannel experience.
The Showroom touchscreen was built in 4 weeks receiving over 130,000 visits in the first month, press coverage throughout Europe and a rollout in Germany.
Developing with React and React Native, JavaScript frontend libraries maintained by Facebook meant only one codebase was needed for web, iOS and Android. This increased the development speed by 30% and also enable the development team the ability to work on both the web and mobile platforms simultaneously.
A shared codebase between React and React Native made it possible to write the business logic and static typing once, and hence could be re-used across the applications. The impact: faster delivery, a consistent customer experience and less surface for bugs across the 3 products.
Apollo GraphQL was used to create a flexible data layer that was accessible to the frontend team. This limited development requirements on the backend, helping to evolve out of legacy, whilst also improving site performance.
Node.js and Next.js were leveraged for server-side rendering which improved performance and page load time, thereby bolstering MADE.com’s SEO within a fiercely competitive space within the industry.
