The Crew Clothing Company initially needed a new way to serve customers at pop-up stores, especially when this retail format became valuable during the pandemic, when many traditional stores were still closed or under-visited.  

Prioritising rapid deployment, agility and ease-of-use, Crew was able to bypass the usual constraints associated with traditional retail architecture, and rip and replace by using a retail development platform and modern development capability to transform its in-store IT infrastructure.  

Rapid deployment and speedy transformation programme

Easy scalability allowed rapid deployment and continued organic growth – from pop-ups to Crew Clothing bricks and mortar stores. The first solution was delivered within 10 weeks of conception and was expanded to 100 stores within a month, bringing a fast, agile evolution of the in-store experience to the staff and customer.  

Crew Clothing store staff have been highly engaged with the transformation programme, collaborating on new initiatives, and suggesting improvements. The mobile platform enables staff to work more efficiently and focus on delivering great customer experience.  

The solution design and integration has been made exceptionally straightforward allowing for employees of any technical level to pick up and use the solution with minimal training. The platform’s intelligent orchestration built onto AWS means retail hierarchy, roles and access management are all brought to the edge on users’ tablets.  

The mobile solution ensures an equally reliable offline experience, from real-time updates to transactions, order management, and other critical tasks, all of which can be constantly synced between user devices and, when possible, the Graphene platform on AWS. 

Proactive monitoring and alerting functions ensure performance SLAs are tracked and met, while integrations with payment providers, hardware and additional applications ensure a great user experience.

How PMC’s Rapid Retail Development Platform transformed Crew’s in-store experience

This design-led approach to adopting modern commerce does not have to rely on a single change programme, nor a replacement of everything that already works. The result is that retailers are increasingly adopting a blend of rapid development, integration, and packaged software approaches to delivering rapid change. 

Benefitting from a low cost of entry, cloud native architectures like AWS have fundamentally changed the pace of software delivery. Getting started on a modern commerce journey no longer requires a full ‘rip and replace’ of existing systems.  

IT teams are utilising cloud native toolsets to get started. The relative cost of entry is low if you have the necessary retail skills. In addition to a lower run cost, scalability, flexibility, security, and resilience are further benefits that cloud can offer. 

Richard Surman, Head of IT at Crew Clothing, spoke about PMC's involvement and the strong partnership built together: "We selected PMC to deliver a fully mobile trading platform, enabling Crew to have a vastly improved technical retail proposition and customer experience. The solution design and integration has been made exceptionally straightforward allowing for employees of any technical level to pick up and use the solution with minimal training.

PMC’s ability to deliver complex solutions but in a scalable fashion has allowed our business to deploy the product rapidly, meeting multiple requirements for a number of scenarios, including sponsorship events and marketing campaigns.

The speed at which PMC delivered the solution from inception to full roll-out has been exceptional and their approach in developing the solution has been second to none. I am very proud of the partnership that Crew and PMC have and look forward to working together on future innovations over the coming years."