Boohoo
Group
Senior developer with Boohoo Group, migrating individual brands onto a new unified, headless, React‑based platform. Enabling shared functionality and customisable components.
In Detail
Five years ago, following its acquisition of Debenhams, Boohoo Group started a replatforming project to move multiple brands onto one headless e‑commerce platform. The work needed to support shared delivery whilst still allowing each brand to keep its own identity, merchandising needs, and growth plans.
Coming off the back of several years working with John Lewis and then Selfridges, I joined the team as a senior engineer, focusing primarily on the development of all‑new, brand‑themeable, React‑based components in Storybook. These components were designed and developed with both flexibility and reusability in mind, intended to be used across any one of the many (and different) Boohoo Group websites.
Developing shared components in this way allowed us to maintain the individual identity and aesthetic of each brand whilst taking advantage of the economies of scale that having a shared, highly documented codebase like this affords us. It also meant that we could improve the user experience, improving consistency and accessibility across each brand from a single point.
As you might imagine, aside from the development side of this role, there was also a significant people‑centric aspect to it, working closely with stakeholders across the brands to ensure that the components we developed (and then used to build each brand PLP and PDP in particular) fitted with their specific needs.
We integrated these components on top of a unified, headless platform alongside CommerceTools and AEM for legacy content. That gave the migrated brands a shared implementation with brand‑specific storefronts on top. From launch, the brands moved to the new system saw a significant uptick in visitors and conversions to sales, whilst overall operational costs reduced.
Two Homepages, One Codebase
Both the Boohoo and Debenhams homepages sit on the same architecture, the same code, and the same components. The differences lie in the way each has been themed and how the shared components have been templated, allowing the Boohoo homepage to keep its neo‑brutalist aesthetic, whilst Debenhams retains a more subtle design.
Sharing components in this way means that maintenance and future feature development can be rolled out to each (and ‑ eventually ‑ other brands within the Boohoo Group) from a single codebase.
As with many other projects I've worked on, the content comes from an AEM instance, giving content creators (for each individual brand) the freedom to lay out and publish the homepage as they see fit, headlessly.
Product Listing Pages & Filters
Product Listing and Details pages are where the different brands within the Group differ the most. Nevertheless, for the PLPs, the same approach is true everywhere within this project: these are all shared components from the same Component Library, with different themes applied.
This variation in styling via themes ensures that the core functionality of each component is preserved whilst allowing each brand to maintain its own unique aesthetic.
Product Detail Pages
In any e‑commerce application, the PDP is the most important page of the site. It is here that a website (hopefully) offers the user all of the information they need to decide whether to purchase the product or not.
Here, my team and I developed several featureful components, in particular, the gallery carousel and the way the product imagery is presented. This is very different between the different brands, and was a real challenge to develop in a way that could be used across the group.
Aside from the gallery, we also have all the features you would expect for a PDP: size guides, colour options and ‑ of course ‑ the ability to buy.
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John Kavanagh is an incredibly talented and efficient developer with great expertise in Gatsby and Contentful. He is incredibly personable and also always willing to share his knowledge. I also appreciated his ability to communicate openly and in a way that allowed me to find a way forward with him.
It was a pleasure to work with John and I would welcome another opportunity to work with him again!"
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John Kavanagh is one of the most professional developers I have worked with. Add to this a synergy between some of the values which Underwired holds in high regard (perfectionism, creativity in all skillets and future facing) and you have someone I wouldn't hesitate to recommend for front‑end development work."
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John Kavanagh is a highly intelligent and truly senior front‑end web developer, who's surprisingly well versed in the arcana of CSS. For Macmillan he was initially churning out static templates on an SCSS BEM architecture, but soon moved on to managing the team (three developers), assigning and tracking tasks using a Trello board he introduced, and helping me nudge the team towards an integrated, Web Components based production pipeline. I enjoyed John's productivity and attitude, and I very much look forward to working together again."
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I initially worked with John Kavanagh at Style.com where we built an e‑commerce site for Condé Nast. We built numerous versions of the site for prototypal purposes and finally went live with a version that contained the majority of work from John and his team. Always punctual, proactive and willing, he's definitely one to have in any development team. Since then we went on to work together again at HSBC where we built a number of key React components. He's a great team player who takes a lot of pride in his work, I'd highly recommend him."
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John Kavanagh is one of the best front‑end developers I've had the pleasure of working with. Incredibly knowledgeable, great attention to detail – he understands design and why it's important to get it right, and he's also very experienced coding for accessibility. Always professional but with a great sense of fun, John would be an asset to any team and project."
