Case Study

Charles Tyrwhitt

Development of new website to support future growth.

Development of Charles Tyrwhitt’s new website, to support future growth.

Charles Tyrwhitt is a British clothing retailer specialising in formal men’s shirts, shoes, suits, knitwear and accessories, as well as lines of womenswear and a casual range. Since its foundation as a catalogue business in 1990, Charles Tyrwhitt has grown to become a full-scale omni-channel retailer with a commitment to quality at the heart of its offering. The retailer has 24 stores in the UK, USA and France, with its flagship on London’s Jermyn Street, and delivers to 100+ countries worldwide. Charles Tyrwhitt is set to take around £150 million online, this year alone.

Background

With four-fold growth in sales over the last five years, Charles Tyrwhitt’s bespoke ecommerce platform had reached its full potential and was restricting the retailer’s ability to cater for customer demand during peak periods, deliver an enhanced omni-channel customer experience, and enable the retailer’s plans for international growth.

Project

Due to Javelin Group’s specialist retail knowledge and proven track record of successfully developing and implementing commerce technology solutions (read systems integration case studies), Charles Tyrwhitt engaged Javelin Group as its strategic implementation partner and to develop the new ecommerce platform on Demandware Commerce Cloud.

Outputs

The new website was launched in the UK, USA, Germany and Australia, and delivers a vastly improved customer experience including:

  • Device-optimised design across mobile, tablet and desktop
  • Enhanced personalisation
  • Enriched merchandising including customer recommendations
  • Significantly improved web performance
  • Vastly improved speed-to-market for new regions

In the words of Simon Kerry, CIO of Charles Tyrwhitt: “We were live in the UK, US, Germany and Australia all at the same time and a testament of how well it went was we turned off our old site at 1am and turned on the new one at 3am and I took 40 people down to the pub at 2pm that same day.”

The retailer’s aims for future expansion include building a presence in a number of additional territories over the next three years. Systems integration from Javelin Group, on the Demandware commerce platform, will help Charles Tyrwhitt to quickly launch local language, local currency ecommerce sites for new regions.

We have a notable percentages of sales coming from retail stores, contact centres and online channels including mobile and tablet. However, we needed the central backbone to tie these channels more closely together to enhance our omni-channel experience for our customers. Demandware’s scalable commerce platform and the digital retail strategy and implementation experience of Javelin Group have resulted in a flawless transformation of the Charles Tyrwhitt customer experience.

The joint effort has equipped us with the resources to continue enhancing our speed to market and developing the new functionality to meet customer needs. The new website launch has gone more smoothly than we could have imagined, and this is testament to the effort, focus and high standard of work involved by everyone in the Javelin Group, Demandware and Charles Tyrwhitt teams.
Simon Kerry, CIO, Charles Tyrwhitt.

www.ctshirts.com

Find out more about Javelin Group’s ecommerce development work on the Demandware platform.