Clarks Tracks a Successful Transition to a Modern, Composable Tech Stack

The Clarks shoe brand has been a fixture in footwear for nearly 200 years, founded by two brothers in England crafting a slipper from sheepskin. In its many years, Clarks has developed more than 20,000 styles of shoes and operates a global brick-and-mortar and online business.

The company’s products and history are synonymous with quality and reliability. Maintaining that legacy is essential.

In 2023, Clarks was faced with a challenge. The company needed to transfer more than a dozen years of working on an old, monolithic commerce platform into a brand-new composable commerce structure. To enhance and inspire omnichannel shopping — within just a few months — Clarks underwent a pivotal technology transformation that better prepared the organization for the future of retail.

The transformation was ultimately a success: Clarks modernized a point-of-sale (POS) system that was more than 20 years old, re-created more than 400 content pages per website, and fulfilled compliance requirements within the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Republic of Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Europe.

Here’s what Clarks learned on its journey to composability.

Clarks Overhauls its Technology Infrastructure

Working from a monolithic platform, or software tied to one singular provider managing multiple processes, Clarks learned that its platform was facing an “end of life” by 2023. The company also believed its digital experiences lacked excitement and uncovered issues with siloed, third party-run websites that caused inefficiencies in how the company operated.

Clarks’ goal: overhaul its technology stack to ensure sustainability and scalability.

At the start, company leaders admittedly didn’t know much about composable or MACH technologies. Clarks set up a transition team to study the requirements of a more cloud-based, modernized tech architecture, working with a systems integrator and leveraging resources like the MACH Alliance, a not-for-profit body that helps educate companies on the needs and capabilities of a composable framework.

MACH architectures must include microservices, API-first components, cloud-native SaaS solutions, and headless tools that ensure the front-end digital experience is decoupled from back-end programming.

By leveraging MACH, companies like Clarks can avoid locking into one monolithic provider and instead partner with multiple solution providers​, offering best-of-breed functionality within an overall tech stack.

For Clarks, it meant it needed to reassess its entire systems architecture, including a:

• headless commerce tool to power the online checkout process;
• product information management (PIM) system;
• content management system (CMS);
• order management system (OMS); and
• POS solution.

The overall transformation enabled Clarks' IT team to identify the right technology system for each goal, make more nimble business decisions, and improve its customer experience.

MACH Makes for a Speedy Transformation

During the technology transformation, Clarks found the composable architecture fueled a faster launch. Clarks was able to get up and running within just a few months. In some cases, technology implementations can take years.

One benefit of composable technology is that new solutions can couple-on, merge, grow and expand quickly over time, and components can be replaced if they're no longer needed or are no longer fit for purpose. This provides a sustainable nature to the architecture. The structure is intuitive, logical and flexible. Since implementing composable tech, Clarks’ IT team can innovate faster to meet developing shopper needs.

After the new commerce platform launched, Clarks quickly realized impressive returns such as:

• a nearly 80 percent increase in add-to-basket activity;
• 17 percent increase in online conversions; and
• site speed increased by almost 30 percent.

A MACH approach led to Clarks running a unified commerce operation with data and assets flowing to a single source of truth and tracking real-time inventory numbers. The shoe brand instantly implemented a technology framework that better supports business teams to help make decisions more effectively and strategically.

Clarks Navigates an Omnichannel Future

With a future-proofed MACH architecture in place, Clarks' IT team continues to update components and seeks ways to innovate its overall digital experience for consumers.

For example, Clarks is finding new levels of consistency within its personalization programs and how it delivers an omni-shopping journey. The company is unlocking event streaming, which provides new data to influence business tactics, too.

Clarks is innovating more cost effectively by leveraging the modular components of a MACH architecture. The company’s journey to MACH has enabled its customers to shop when and how they want, all while providing the IT team with a consistent technical experience without trade-offs from its monolithic platform.

Going composable within the tech stack has set up a long-running, legendary brand to be ready for any and all trends and retail changes ahead.

Holly Hall is managing director of MACH Alliance, a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems.