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, and following their acquisition of Debenhams, Boohoo Group embarked on an ambitious transformation and replatforming project aimed at consolidating its portfolio of diverse brands onto a singular, state‑of‑the‑art, headless e‑commerce platform. The goal was twofold: to streamline their operational processes and to lay the groundwork for a more scalable and agile digital ecosystem that could support each individual brand and the Group's growth and evolving business needs.
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. The result is an extremely fast, robust, powerful, and feature‑rich platform with multiple unique brand websites sitting on top of it. From launch, the brands that have been migrated over to this new system so far have seen a significant uptick in visitors and conversions to sales, whilst overall operational costs have 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.
