From Monolith to Modular: 
Premium cycling apparel brand Rapha are purveyors of the world's finest riding apparel, made by cyclists, for cyclists. They were on a digital journey of their own, as they began to explore the world of composable eCommerce, and what that might unlock for their business.
Rapha's product and technical leadership team sought a partner they could trust to guide them through this transition within a set timeframe, to navigate the complex task of migrating away from SAP Hybris to a composable architecture.
Not only did Rapha require support to build a strategic roadmap & project plan, but also augment their internal team with additional people-power to move from a limited monolithic architecture to a more flexible composable tech stack. With the shared end goals from reducing complexity & total cost of ownership, to increase project velocity and support the commerce migration. Let us ride on...
Technical Discovery: Prioritising Opportunities
Rapha's existing eCommerce platform, Hybris, struggled to scale efficiently with the brand's growing business needs. As a legacy platform, it lacked the modern features and capabilities that Rapha needed to innovate and enhance the customer experience. Tight coupling between Hybris and other systems made it difficult to maintain and any change required extensive testing and coordination across multiple systems.
Together with their in-house engineering team, we carried out an extensive technical discovery to help us define an architectural “north star”, build a detailed project plan for their migration away from Hybris to Commerce Layer and ensure all parties were aligned. This collaborative and comprehensive Discovery phase addressed:
What target architecture would support Rapha’s next phase of growth
What their technical direction should look like in the next 3-5 years?
What the migration strategy and rollout plan would encompass
What to tackle first (assessing risk vs value)
What the total cost of ownership would be & what savings could be made with the new architecture
To determine the best approach, options were evaluated against risk and value. Each roadmap initiative was then prioritised using a RICE framework to assess its Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. By focusing on building a decoupled robust system that could easily be maintained in the long term, improving testing capabilities and implementing feature-rich, performant tooling now, Rapha would be in a stronger position to make improvements to mobile commerce, checkout and the customer service workflow later down the line. Finally, to manage risk, each initiative would be rolled out in phases, by market.
To avoid expensive renewal fees, Rapha needed to move off of Hybris by the end of the year whilst also ensuring they were set up properly on the new eCommerce platform. Working closely together, we identified and mitigated risks early on and accelerated the timeline to bring key milestones forward. As a Commerce Layer partner, we have a deep understanding of the platform and could help Rapha successfully integrate it with their existing systems to leverage key features effectively.
Agile, Augmented Team
To help power this project, a team of Rotate° engineers, product managers and designers plugged into Rapha's internal teams. Together, we followed a dual-track Agile approach that split the project into two tracks - Shaping and Delivery - to ensure solutions were scoped and built correctly and efficiently. Whilst the Shaping track focused on understanding user needs, business requirements and acceptance criteria, Delivery worked on translating those initiatives into effective features and code.
Previously Rapha had adopted some agile practices, but with guidance we introduced more rigour and consistency with events such as key rituals (sprint planning, showcases and retrospectives) as well as augmenting backlog refinement and a focus on delivery and shipping code which promoted accelerated project progress. Similarly there was a stronger focus on cross-departmental collaboration and communication, where historically knowledge silos existed which reduced blockers and improved overall velocity.
Rotate° has quickly become a trusted partner integrated with our own team; their deep understanding of composable eCommerce, combined with their support in onboarding us to agile ways of working, has been invaluable.
Design Audits and Recommendations
We conducted design audits of key customer flows including Product Detail Pages (PDP)s, cart and checkout. This was part of a lean approach to enhancing the user experience and supported the larger platform migration to a headless front-end powered by Contentful CMS. After a deep dive into competitor analysis and research of best practices, we identified various design enhancements.
On the account pages, it was important that users could easily update their personal details (addresses, card information etc.), access their wishlist and view their purchase history. The original accounts area lacked visible navigation features which made it challenging to navigate. On mobile, the “Need Help” call-to-action was hidden and order tracking/cost breakdown was cut off.
When exploring how to elevate the PLP and search results page, we made a number of recommendations for various features across desktop and mobile. These included reviewing filtering, product comaparisons, wishlist feature and use of product imagery.
Having moved to a new eCommerce platform, there was an opportunity to enhance the checkout experience. Rather than a custom redesign and build, we looked to refine the UX to significantly improve abandonment rate and increase conversion. To streamline the process for inputting customer details, delivery information and payment, our recommendations included various trust cues and UI improvements and other payment methods (e.g Buy Now, Pay Later).
Global Rollout
Whilst the primary objective of our collective work stream was to migrate the checkout element from Hybris to Commerce Layer, this involved a number of complexities and dependencies associated with any mature commerce business.
At first, data migrations were performed with Microsoft Nav to provide a foundation for a successful migration.
Similarly many systems had to be mapped as part of the migration plan including fulfiliment (GXO), returns (Narvar) Search (Algolia), CRM (Bloomreach) and Reviews (Bazaar Voice). Also associated integrations were set up with Contentful their chosen CMS to enable product decoration and enrichment across the shopping journey.
Once the foundations were in place, a global rollout strategy was agreed working across lower risk markets initially, where we could simultaneously move from orders in Hybris over to Commerce Layer. Once we had confidence in the data with each market, we’d then move to the next phase. Overall 11 phases of rollout de-risked the consumer launch.
Riding to New Heights: The Key Results
Throughout this re-architecture project, Rapha’s internal teams have worked closely with us, learning the new architecture and adopting agile principles and processes that have significantly increased team velocity.
Not only has the move from monolith to composable unlocked system flexibility and scalability, it has also saved them over £1M a year in architectural fees.
With their new, composable architecture, Rapha can continue to scale and grow with a custom tech stack built to their needs.
Tech Stack
CMS – Contentful 
eCommerce – Commerce Layer 
Search – Algolia 
ERP – Business Central 
DAM – Cloudinary 
Payments – Adyen 
CRM & CDP – Bloomreach 