Burberry chooses headless CMS to enable speed and agility

In the fast-paced world of fashion and luxury goods, Burberry has undergone extensive digital transformation across an array of platforms. Faced with the demands of multiple collections, extensive translation requirements and a need to deliver high-performing experiences to discerning customers, the limitations of Burberry’s legacy, monolithic content management and e-commerce platform became apparent.

This was seen most clearly in slow time to market and a failure to reflect the brand values of creativity and innovation. This led to an inability to deliver the quality of experience befitting of the Burberry brand, at pace and scale, throughout web, mobile and other channels and across multiple locales and languages.

As a strategic response to this issue, Burberry chose a MACH (microservices, API, cloudnative and headless)-based strategy to guide e-commerce and personalization technology investment. A composable approach enables speed and agility in responding to new market opportunities. Following a thorough review of the market, Contentstack was selected as the CMS component of this digital transformation.

Contentstack was picked based on its ease of language management and integrations, and the advantages of a truly headless architecture.

As a MACH-certified solution, Contentstack integrates seamlessly with Smartling to enable comprehensive translation, alongside commercetools, the e-commerce platform chosen by Burberry.

Contentstack offers intuitive use for editors, reducing the time necessary to train and be effective in their role from days to a matter of minutes. Contentstack improves the productivity of these teams by allowing them to curate, update, preview and publish content rapidly. This is achieved with powerful workflow processes, augmented by rigorous roles and permissions capabilities.

Contentstack was also chosen based on the unique live preview feature. This enables Burberry to preview content across multiple channels before saving or publishing it live. The ability to edit entries and preview these changes in real-time not only ensures consistency and quality but also frees the Burberry content creation team from developer delays when it comes to updating material.

Contentstack was implemented by system integrator and partner EPAM and is now used throughout Burberry.

Contentstack CMS has accelerated content creation for international markets across multiple languages. Burberry is now able to create global desktop and mobile sites for each country and bulk publish in up to 50 languages.

This speed has gone hand-in-hand with improved service to the content creation staff. Calls to the development team have reduced drastically from more than 40 user tickets a week to fewer than one.

The evolution of the translation capabilities has been a key element of this reduced burden on the helpdesk, and the consequent improvements in agility and speed. Translation work is now 80% quicker compared to the previous CMS.

With regards to impact on productivity and output the Contentstack system has enabled Burberry to deliver relevant content to story-telling and landing pages faster and more accurately across global websites in 11 languages.

“Contentstack helps our engineers to move fast and concentrate on business requirements by reducing proprietary platform inconveniences,” said Sonia Latoracca, digital commerce content manager at Burberry. “Adding new consumers has never been such an easy and pleasant journey for everyone.”

“Creating content is quicker and easier with Contentstack,” Latoracca said. “It’s a user friendly tool making training and onboarding simpler. The integration with our translation and media systems means content can be created and published much quicker than before. The flexible, reuseable components allow us to complete new designs briefs without the need for constant development.”

Contentstack has enabled Burberry to create and publish content faster and more accurately through its integration functionality with other tools in Burberry’s ecosystem. With this technology, Burberry has the agility to stay at the forefront of changing trends and seize opportunities for growth.