TechStyle: Accelerating Enterprise Efficiency with Automation & Integration

The challenge: unlocking scalability and efficiency in a complex ecosystem

TechStyle Fashion Group is the global fashion incubator behind multi-million dollar brands like Fabletics and Savage X Fenty. Their custom-built, industry-leading ecommerce platform is the backbone of their many websites and app experiences. However, one major piece of TechStyle’s platform was yet to be fully developed: the tools and architecture to support robust workflows for publishing and updating digital assets.

As the company continued its rapid growth, the lack of tools in this area became a pressing issue. Publishing their ever-growing set of product photos had become a laborious task for their internal teams. It was both inefficient and frustrating.

TechStyle tapped Whitespectre to work across multiple business units and help them design and implement a new approach for digital asset publishing within their platform. Together, our end goal was to introduce a powerful, enterprise-level solution to help their teams achieve new levels of efficiency and have a scalable foundation for the future.

Connecting a fragmented system with a productivity-first solution

To kick off this project, our product, UI/UX design, and engineering teams worked closely with TechStyle to thoroughly deconstruct and analyze their current technical solution as well as the processes and workflows around it, and then recommend more functional and holistic approaches for TechStyle to choose from.

The investigative work uncovered a disjointed system with interactions across multiple business units. Over time, less than optimal workflows had evolved around this system, owing to product limitations, temporary fixes, and the cross-dependencies between TechStyle’s Marketing, Site Merchandising, and Creative teams. By comparing existing and recommended workflows and solutions, we collaboratively developed a winning approach that would enable their teams to effortlessly manage and publish assets to the product detail pages on their storefront.

Engineering the future: a unified system & better tools

Our engineering team consolidated TechStyle’s multiple digital asset management subsystems into a one-stop front-end application and user interface. The new bespoke solution was built leveraging proven technologies already used within the TechStyle Group ecosystem, including AWS CDK, Next.js, Redis, and Adobe DAM. Throughout the process we stayed in close conversation with the TechStyle engineering group who would later adopt and build upon this robust foundation.

The resulting Site Asset Management tool – known as "SAM" – was an integrated, automated, single source of truth. The user-friendly interface made the process of publishing and updating visual assets far easier, with new capabilities for image sequencing, sorting, naming logic, live previews, and more. Overall, the solution reduced what previously took hours of back-and-forth between their teams to a simple, 5-minute process in SAM.

The outcome: exponential efficiency gains and a foundation for future expansion

Having successfully translated TechStyle’s complex workflows and needs into a smart, custom-built solution, we conducted onboarding and training sessions for the tool. This "handover and evangelizing" step equipped the TechStyle team with the skills, knowledge and excitement to fully embrace the new system, paving the way for faster adoption and higher user satisfaction.

Simultaneously, we engaged in an extensive knowledge transfer and documentation process with our close partners in TechStyle's Engineering group, detailing future areas of opportunities. These collaborative efforts laid a strong foundation for TechStyle's powerful expansion and further development of the tool in its subsequent phase.

Ultimately, the successful implementation and rollout of the new digital asset management tool, 'SAM,' marked a significant milestone for TechStyle. It dramatically cut down on manual and redundant tasks, minimized errors, and streamlined operations. These wins translated into a substantial increase in workflow efficiency and significantly improved internal team satisfaction. To date, SAM has been successfully deployed across three of TechStyle Group's brands, with further deployments on the horizon.

The Site Asset Management (SAM) tool has transformed the way we’ve manage and publish our product imagery. It’s crazy powerful and I love the support we got from Whitespectre throughout the project. After the hand-off, the readability of Whitespectre's code and architecture made it easy for our team to jump in. It’s been impressive how we’ve been able to extend it internally to our other brands without having to rebuild anything. It’s extensive and works very well.

Whitespectre's level of structure, collaboration, and open communication is something you don’t typically see, but absolutely need to drive results. It’s one of the biggest advantages of working with them. There’s a thought partnership there, not just at an IC level, but at the management and leadership level. They’re like a group of special forces that drop in and work really closely with a team and just knock out some incredible stuff.