PA Consulting client story
Photobox is the European market-leader in the personalised gifting business, operating in 10 countries with ambitious growth plans. Dedicated to delighting their customers, Photobox recognised they needed to modernise and futureproof their technology to offer their customers a consistent and seamless shopping experience and set themselves up for future growth. To assist them on this journey, we worked with Photobox to re-build, modernise and improve their creation studio – which lets users create personalised products – and led the migration of their key brands onto a single global e-commerce platform.
Photobox is the European market-leader in the personalised gifting business. The company also owns a number of European brands, including Hofmann and PosterXXL, both of which Photobox acquired between 2011 and 2015.
With today’s market all about speed and differentiating experiences, businesses need to move faster, from innovating capabilities and onboarding new brands, to entering new markets and adding products to digital channels. We worked with Photobox’s digital team to unlock opportunities to develop innovative digital products that delight their customers, integrate their brands onto a single platform and scale at pace.
Photobox brought us in to help rapidly stand-up a team to accelerate the modernisation of their creation studio, the digital application where customers create personalised products like photobooks. Their old studio was built on Adobe Flash, which Google Chrome, their users’ main browser of choice, and all major browsers would no longer be supporting. Our team provided expertise in strategic delivery, experience design, front- and back-end engineering, and automation testing to develop the new digital platform from scratch. We then created a mobile web version as an extension of the core platform in just three months.
Previously it would take Photobox weeks of development effort to hard code new products into the creation studio. With our help, this process now takes just a matter of days, reducing costs in development and increasing the company’s flexibility to respond to changes in the market or new product innovations. The new creation studio also allows customers to create products faster and empowers them to design personalised books and other products, improving their overall experience. And conversation rates – as measured by the number of people who, having started a project on the website click to purchase it – improved.
Recognising the strength of our delivery through the success of the creation studio, Photobox asked us to mobilise another two teams to support the migration of the underlying platform onto a single platform to include their global brands. Our team provided the engineering expertise, architecture guidance and delivery management capability to support this migration, working alongside Photobox in blended teams to facilitate knowledge transfer. As part of the migration onto a single web platform, we also supported the migration of their CRM system onto Adobe Campaign Standard. With a single platform to route orders to factories, Photobox can moderate spikes in demand by balancing workloads across its factories. And they can launch product categories that were once only available via one brand or in one region, on a much wider scale.
With our help, Photobox were also able to capitalise on digital technology innovations such as Lambda@Edge on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The self-service nature of the cloud platform enabled them to focus their technical expertise on improving the customer experience and launching new products. We also worked with the business to implement event sourcing to track users’ interactions throughout the customer experience. Built in React, a JavaScript library for constructing user interfaces, this allows Photobox to collect data to make better business decisions.
Today, Photobox are well positioned to grow and continue delighting customers.
