WARDA Dresses Up Global Fashion Brands Using AWS

WARDA’s SeeCommerce solution gives fashion brands an efficient way to manage their product catalogues, promote their brands, and increase sales. Moving to AWS has allowed it to provide major brand names in fashion, luxury, and retail with a more flexible and reliable solution, and helped it to realize its own growth ambitions. 

In the high fashion industry, making a handbag or ankle boot look as luxurious and attractive online as it does in real life is what allows a brand to win ecommerce customers when so many other options are available. 

Creating this appeal means amassing high-quality photos and videos and descriptive text to promote the clothing, accessories, or footwear the brand sells. Once digitised, this content then needs to be stored, managed, and shared with retail customers as well as with other businesses such as suppliers and resellers. With many fashion brands selling hundreds of thousands of products, managing all of this information can be a cumbersome process. 

Italy’s WARDA has created a software solution, called SeeCommerce, that allows fashion brands to more easily manage product catalogues and digital assets. It allows them to run their ecommerce operations more efficiently, increase control over their all-important brand perception, and ultimately boost sales.

Having worked with major Italian brand names in fashion, luxury, and retail, WARDA knows its customers experience variable demand for product information, with demand spikes on busy shopping days such as Black Friday and during sales or industry events. 

WARDA realized that to better serve its customers and fulfil its growth ambitions of increasing its customer base from 15 to 40 within 3 years, it needed more flexibility in its IT—and to get that, it needed to switch to a cloud-native approach. 

WARDA reached out to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which it’s been working with for nearly a decade. “AWS is always there for us in terms of technology, for training, services, and innovation,” says Marco Serpilli, chief executive officer at WARDA. “It also understands our business and our customers’ needs, and supports us as we grow.”

WARDA redesigned its IT architecture using AWS. The new solution immediately proved its scalability during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many high-street shops closed and fashion outlets saw increased demand for product information online, both directly with consumers and between fashion designers, suppliers, and resellers. WARDA customers responded by producing 150 percent more digital content than prior to the pandemic. 

Using AWS, WARDA was there for its customers during this unusual time. WARDA could increase compute capacity for SeeCommerce to meet the rising demand with a few clicks, so customers always had quick and reliable access to their content. 

WARDA was able to innovate during the pandemic. It launched an integrated videoconferencing feature based on Amazon Chime that allowed teams working from home to collaborate on essential tasks such as approving new photos from product photo shoots. 

Along with meeting event-based demand spikes and innovating, WARDA can now also easily accommodate customers’ growth. Thanks to the scalability of Amazon CloudFront, if a brand wants to add hundreds or thousands of additional products to a catalogue for a new fashion line or sale, SeeCommerce easily supports this. “Increasing catalogue size is not a technical issue for us now but simply a payment issue for customers,” says Serpilli. 

AWS also helps WARDA to handle complex data issues for product catalogues, where a single identification code for an item such as a handbag can be tied to hundreds of other pieces of information. An innovative data processing approach based on AWS allows SeeCommerce to handle data queries in a timely matter and provide customers with reliable access to their product information.

Given that WARDA serves more than 15 fashion and consumer goods brands, some of whom are competitors, it’s also essential that WARDA protect the privacy of customers’ product data and ensure that the photos of an upcoming fashion launch, for instance, are not viewed by other brands. Thanks to Amazon Cognito, WARDA can manage customer identities and restrict access to sensitive content. 

Working with AWS has supported WARDA’s own growth ambitions, too. The new system allows it to bring new customers on board within 1 week, compared to about a month previously, and to serve both small and large brands. SeeCommerce supports catalogs of any size, whether it has 10,000 or 100,000 products. 

This has allowed the company of only 15 people to serve multinational brands with billions of euros in turnover. “We could hardly have won such large customers without AWS,” says Serpilli. 

Encouraged by the success gained with the new architecture, WARDA is confident it can continue to grow. “It’s the intense innovation we’re undergoing with AWS, adding functionality and increasing our scalability and security, that is allowing us to expand the scope of our business,” explains Serpilli.