Re-platforming a $200M+ multi-brand e-commerce operation

Business context

A well-known Australian multi-brand retailer — operating four distinct consumer brands through a single e-commerce platform — had reached the limits of their legacy monolith. The platform, originally built on a heavily customised open-source framework, was approaching a decade old. It worked, but barely: deployments took days, simple content changes required engineering tickets, and the cost of maintaining custom integrations was consuming most of the technology budget.

The business was growing, but the platform wasn’t keeping up. Peak trading events were increasingly fragile, the team was spending more time on maintenance than on capability, and the marketing function was entirely dependent on engineering for anything customer-facing.

The challenge

The executive team had already decided something needed to change, but hadn’t aligned on what. There were competing perspectives: a full rebuild on a headless architecture, a migration to Shopify Plus, or a staged modernisation of the existing platform. Each option had internal sponsors and vendor backing. What was missing was an independent assessment grounded in the business’s actual constraints.

Key complications included a non-negotiable peak trading window that limited migration timing, four brands with shared infrastructure but divergent customer experiences, a team that had only ever worked on the existing platform, and a board that wanted cost reduction alongside capability improvement.

My role

Brought in as Fractional CTO to lead the technology strategy and oversee the platform transition. The brief was to recommend the right path, build the plan, and ensure the business could execute without betting the farm on a single vendor’s promise.

What I did

Assessment and recommendation (weeks 1–6). Conducted a structured evaluation of the existing platform, mapped business requirements across all four brands, and ran a vendor selection process that included VTEX, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Shopify Plus. The recommendation was VTEX, based on its native multi-brand architecture, composable integration model, and total cost of ownership profile. Critically, it also allowed a phased migration — all four brands didn’t need to move simultaneously.

Architecture design. Designed a composable architecture with VTEX as the commerce engine, Contentful for brand-specific content management, Segment for customer data unification across brands, Braze for lifecycle marketing, and Snowflake as the analytics foundation. The architecture prioritised operational independence for each brand while maintaining shared infrastructure where it made commercial sense.

Migration planning. Rather than a big-bang migration, sequenced the move brand by brand, starting with the smallest brand as a proving ground. This approach reduced risk dramatically — learnings from the first migration were applied at scale. Each phase had clear rollback criteria agreed before work commenced.

Team restructuring. Worked with the existing engineering leadership to restructure the team around the new architecture. This included upskilling developers on headless patterns, hiring two senior engineers with composable commerce experience, and transitioning several roles into a newly created platform operations function.

Vendor management. Led the commercial negotiation with VTEX and the selected system integrator, establishing contract terms that protected the business’s interests around delivery quality, timeline accountability, and IP ownership.

Systems and platforms

VTEX as the composable commerce platform; Contentful for brand-level content management; Segment for cross-brand customer data unification; Braze for lifecycle marketing automation; Snowflake as the analytics and data warehouse foundation; Cloudflare for edge performance and security.

The architecture was deliberately composable — each component independently replaceable, with no single vendor dependency capable of holding the business hostage at contract renewal.

Outcomes

The migration was completed across all four brands without unplanned downtime. Platform operating costs fell 40% within the first 12 months as expensive legacy infrastructure and custom integrations were decommissioned. Page performance improved significantly — average load times dropped from 4.2 seconds to 1.1 seconds. The marketing team gained self-service publishing capability for the first time, removing a chronic dependency on engineering. The engineering team was restructured from 22 to 14 people while simultaneously increasing deployment frequency.