Case Study: Arcadia

It wasn't long ago I was working with Arcadia. The story of Phillip Green and the retail empire is something I shan't go into, it's a sad tale, and Arcadia was a great place to work with great people.

I've spent two stints working at Arcadia in the past. Once as a developer a very long time ago, and once as a team lead. In 2018 I rejoined the business on a freelance basis, and it was this project that pushed me further forward in my ability to run and manage a team.

I came (somewhat reluctantly) to help with development work. I was promoting myself at the time as a UX thinker; my previous experience at Arcadia and knowledge of their internal systems meant that I would drastically aid thinking and problem solving with some of their archaic and old systems.

The problem internal users had in 2018 (yes, that's correct) is that they had no way of producing content responsively. The existing CMS tool had 'blocks' and 'segments', which you could have text, images and copy, and pull in product data dynamically. But because it was conceived in the early 2000s, it couldn't cope with anything beyond that.

Ancient code, lousy technology.

Whilst working through this old tool and slightly panicking about how we would develop a useable system, I had a bit of a breakthrough. I realised that we could inject an HTML segment into this CMS tool and effectively bypass the system. Yes, a hack.

But a beautiful hack. It meant that we could design something from scratch and present our users with something intuitive.

I worked with some great React Developers (React only being on its early version at the time). We even built a module that could custom draw 'hot spots' around images to uniquely identify clothing on models that customers could pick out and be led to the individual product page.

We delivered this all whilst producing the content responsively. 2/3 months, we were demoing this to internal users. I heard that they were still using it right up to the last moment at Arcadia before its demise.

A proud achievement for me, as we were delivering value on multiple fronts, the internal users could finally produce the content they wanted to without the intervention of a developer, and external customers could view content properly on their mobile devices.