LPP: Designing an omnichannel presence powered by Google Cloud
About LPP
LPP is a Polish clothes manufacturing company founded in 1991 by two friends, Lubianiec and Piechocki, whose initials form the name of the company. Today, LPP manages five clothing brands worn by people across 38 countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and employs more than 24,000 people across its main offices in Central and Estern Europe.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usGrowing demand for its ecommerce services led Polish fashion retailer LPP to migrate from an on-premises setup to Google Cloud, harnessing automation to ensure great shopping experiences globally.
Google Cloud results
- Fosters a DevOps culture among developers by making it easy and quick to deploy new features
- Frees up 90% of time from engineers to focus on creating innovative solutions, instead of managing infrastructure
- Instantly launches new VMs and maintains configurations up to date automatically, enabling developers to launch new features in seconds
- Ensures that online shoppers always have a smooth experience by automatically scaling up and down according to demand
Deploys new ecommerce features in seconds, not weeks
Fashion psychologists have been saying it for years: Our clothes can make us happier. That’s because believing in the symbolic meaning of our clothes and their colors can affect our cognitive processes, and part of those are our emotions. Polish fashion retailer LPP has been taking this fact to heart for 25 years. Even as the business developed and expanded to serve customers across 38 countries, the company remained loyal to its Polish designs, which help their customers look and feel great.
“We have ambitious plans for the next few years, so we have decided to engage with Google Cloud as an experienced partner who provides us with both the know-how and the infrastructure and tools we need to build and maintain our ecommerce sites.”
—Arkadiusz Rucinski, Omnichannel Director, LPPLPP operates under five brand names: Reserved, Cropp, House, Mohito, and Sinsay. But aside from designing, manufacturing, and distributing clothes and accessories, the company also develops technology strategies to support its omnichannel approach to sales. This approach seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience wherever, whenever, and however they wish to purchase LPP’s collections.
“We operate in the fashion industry but we’ve long been a tech-oriented company,” says Marek Maciejewski, Head of IT Service Operations at LPP. Marek explains that LPP launched its first ecommerce platform in 2011. By 2018, as the brands’ popularity grew alongside the online shopping trend, the legacy infrastructure LPP had in place to support its ecommerce operations struggled to keep up with the volume of customers seeking out its sites. The situation became particularly troubling during Black Friday and the summer and Christmas periods, when sales spiked and LPP’s engineers struggled to scale the infrastructure in proportion to the demand. To solve the problem, LPP decided to migrate its ecommerce workloads from on-premises to the cloud, selecting Google Cloud as its strategic digital partner in 2019.
“Developing and investing in ecommerce technology is necessary to meet current expectations of customers and ensure a safe and comfortable shopping experience for them,” says LPP’s Omnichannel Director Arkadiusz Rucinski. “We have ambitious plans for the next few years, so we have decided to engage with Google Cloud as an experienced partner who provides us with both the know-how and the infrastructure and tools we need to build and maintain our ecommerce sites.”
Supporting business growth with a scalable infrastructure
To get started, Marek’s team planned a proof of concept that entailed using Compute Engine to bring existing applications running on physical servers to the cloud.
“The proof of concept aimed at migrating the site from bare metal to the cloud,” says Marek. “We wanted it to achieve expected ecommerce site performance, which is measured as a capability of serving 3,500 backend requests per second. It also sought to design and implement disaster recovery requirements and verify the cost-model of the initiative.”
Taking a brand-by-brand approach and conducting the migration internally with support of Google Cloud technicians, LPP could test the performance of the new environment while upskilling internal DevOps and developers to transition smoothly to the new infrastructure. “After just six weeks, we had migrated our first brand Mohito to Google Cloud and saw that we had the mechanisms to automatically scale up and down according to demand, which was an immediate win for our team,” Marek recalls.
Shortly after the successful proof of concept, the arrival of COVID-19 to Europe forced all of LPP’s bricks and mortar stores to close, causing the brand to rely significantly on the performance of its ecommerce sites. Marek’s team carried on with the migration. During the pandemic, it migrated two brands including the fastest growing, Sinsay. “When our ecommerce sales spiked in the summer of 2020, we were well prepared to handle it smoothly with the ability to scale up and down on Google Cloud without having to spend time and money allocating additional resources to our existing infrastructure,” he says. “This was our green light to start migrating all of our ecommerce workloads of all five brands to Google Cloud.”
“Google Kubernetes Engine enables us to deploy new features for our ecommerce sites very quickly. Previously, it took weeks to launch new instances for each brand. Today, it takes seconds: we simply launch a new machine, deploy the code, and changes are reflected automatically across our environment.”
—Marek Maciejewski, Head of IT Service Operations, LPPHarnessing automation to free up developers for creative tasks
From the moment LPP had its first instance running on Google Cloud, Marek’s team also started to focus on automating it, aiming for a more agile way of working and releasing more engineers’ cycles. They’ve also started working with Google Kubernetes Engine. “Google Kubernetes Engine enables us to deploy new features for our ecommerce sites very quickly,” Marek explains. “Previously, it took weeks to launch new instances for each brand. Today, it takes seconds: we simply launch a new machine, deploy the code, and changes are reflected automatically across our environment,” he shares.
No longer having to manage legacy equipment means that LPP engineers can dedicate more time to finding creative solutions to support the core goal of the business. “Our engineers used to spend up to 80% of their time managing our infrastructure and ensuring that things were running smoothly. Now, with an automated stack, they can instead focus on developing new technologies. One example is our own analytical A/B testing solution which allows us to understand our customers’ expectations so we can respond flexibly and quickly to changes in shopping preferences,” explains Marek.
“Thanks to the automation and scalability enabled by Google Cloud, we can focus on applying our innovative thinking to support our main business goal, which is designing great fashion and delivering it to our customers around the world.”
—Marek Maciejewski, Head of IT Service Operations, LPPKeeping innovation up and customers happy
Currently, LPP is working on the migration of its jewel brand Reserved, using data collected via Google Cloud to better understand its business, marketing activities, and clients. Based on the insights, LPP is also creating original IT solutions tailored to its needs and implementing them throughout the value chain, from product development to distribution logistics and sales channels, aiming to continue providing goods to customers in a timely manner to keep up with fashion trends and customer expectations.
Meanwhile, LPP is collaborating with a Google Ads team of expert advisors to grow its online presence through a range of hard and soft-skill training and consulting on marketing strategy, international growth, and how to optimize user experiences for websites. The collaboration is empowering LPP’s ecommerce team with the know-how to leverage the newest available Google Ads solutions to succeed in a fast-paced environment.
Next, LPP aims to leverage cloud technology to support not only its ecommerce operations, but also its bricks-and-mortar stores.
“Thanks to the automation and scalability enabled by Google Cloud, we can focus on applying our innovative thinking to support our main business goal,” says Marek, “Which is designing great fashion and delivering it to our customers around the world.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About LPP
LPP is a Polish clothes manufacturing company founded in 1991 by two friends, Lubianiec and Piechocki, whose initials form the name of the company. Today, LPP manages five clothing brands worn by people across 38 countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and employs more than 24,000 people across its main offices in Central and Estern Europe.