Styli: From proof of concept to ecommerce giant in six months
About Styli
Styli is an ecommerce hub for top-quality trending fashion with competitive prices. After just a few years, it now offers 25,000+ styles for men, women, and kids, sourced from across the globe. Styli currently services markets in four countries - KSA, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain - with plans to expand to India.
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Contact usUsing Google Cloud technology, ecommerce fashion company Styli was able to launch in a matter of months, scale quickly, and expand to new markets, all while outpacing legacy companies in a highly competitive industry.
Google Cloud results
- Built capabilities at ⅓ of industry cost
- Able to move products in less than half the industry average time
- Went to market in just six months
- Expanded to the entire GCC market in two years, with plans to expand to India
Competing to scale in a booming ecommerce fashion sector
In the face of fast-paced trends and economic lulls, staying stylish has never been more difficult. Thankfully, businesses like Styli are working to ensure that staying in style is accessible and convenient for as many people as possible, producing a wide range of options and styles within budget. Since the advent of online shopping and its constant optimization, consumers race to keep up with "micro-trends" that change nearly every week.
Yet, in the modern fashion sector, being "on trend" does not guarantee profit or growth. Trends move at such breakneck speed that while one product sells out instantly, others may languish on the rack with little to no sales at all, despite steep price cuts. Whether due to sticky decision-making or tired operating models, traditional product development and distribution models are now too slow to outrun competitors.
Enter Styli, an ecommerce company for young, tech-savvy customers across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Established in 2019, Styli achieved both scalability and profitability in a short time, optimizing all aspects of the fashion ecommerce industry, from design and production to payments and customer management.
With Google Cloud solutions such as BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Firestore at its fingertips, Styli has built a strategic approach to customer analytics and fully-digitalized workflows, allowing them to test, adapt, and quickly learn what works best for their market, regardless of any changes to style, trends, or customer preferences. With the ability to investigate customer insights and work with both speed and flexibility, Styli can meet diverse customer needs and intense commercial requirements.
Despite the fact that many fashion companies lost 90% of their profits in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Styli flourished.
"Our goal was to fill the basic need for go-to-market and then grow as we go. We stock for only 45 days, while others stock for 90. We have a very lean and young team."
—Pragyan Priyadarshani, CTO, StyliOptimizing the startup mindset
Styli is part of the 50-year-old multinational conglomerate Landmark Group. This meant Styli faced the unique challenge of shifting from a large enterprise mindset to thinking (and functioning) like a startup.
Pragyan Priyadarshani, the CTO at Styli, joined the company in April 2019 and had a fully operational team by autumn of that year. Instead of depending on legacy and heritage, the team built a completely fresh stack with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and BigQuery, which has been pivotal for Styli’s growth.
The team established a microservice architecture within one year, onboarding developers through GKE. With GKE, the team could spin up clusters, dividing their workloads across multiple nodes to make the application more resilient and reliable. This enabled Styli to build a high-scale application and set the precedent for the company going forward, working in an agile environment to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, for the benefit of both the business and its customers. "Fast fashion calls for agility at a very sharp level. The technology choices we make needed to match this level of agility. Google solutions like Cloud, Flutter etc. allowed us exactly this," says Priyadarshani.
Working with Google Cloud has enabled Styli to optimize testing models, rather than wasting resources and budget on additional marketing. With the support of Google Cloud's multi-zone infrastructure spin up capabilities through Terraform, Styli's plans for future expansion to other markets has also become easier. Its fast-paced expansion will allow the brand to grow its regional marketing capabilities on a global scale.
Making your mark with the cloud
In the fashion industry, the typical lead time is nearly 40 weeks. But to be competitive, companies should aim for no more than eight. Styli's 25,000+ styles are produced in just 45 days, which allows them to be flexible despite any market changes. This is a testament to Styli’s supply chain efficiencies, and need for a streamlined process to handle huge amounts of data.
Thankfully, adaptability is intrinsic to Google Cloud technology. When Styli’s team first began working, they considered some out-of-the-box ecommerce options with other providers, but experienced teething issues. To bypass this, they explored Google Cloud's offerings and found it easy to set up and scalable—just what the business needed. Styli’s entire IT infrastructure is now on Google Cloud. When the business started, its release-to-production velocity was fortnightly major release drops, but now the team produces a minimum of five drops per day, with the help of Cloud Deploy. This uplift in velocity was achieved in part with the help of GKE and Cloud Run. Cloud Run proved particularly helpful as it automatically scales resources needed to run applications based on incoming traffic, which is ideal for businesses that face sudden traffic spikes during sales, promotional events, or new product drops.
"We started with the philosophy of building purposeful technology in-house, so it can evolve as business unfolds. And nothing is better for open-source than Google Cloud," says Priyadarshani.
Cloud technology enables companies to reduce infrastructure costs, allowing developers to focus on refining other efficiencies within the supply chain. And because Styli makes its revenue from online platforms, not brick-and-mortar stores, it's all the more reason to rely on cloud-based systems. This way the team can focus their efforts on optimizing processes and its customer promise, rather than servicing a huge server network or data sets.
"We started with the philosophy of building purposeful technology in-house, so it can evolve as business unfolds. And nothing is better for open-source than Google Cloud."
—Pragyan Priyadarshani, CTO, StyliCustomer insights versus customer data and scalable growth
Customer insights allow businesses to incorporate what sells well (and to whom) to generate early sales. With cloud technology, this can be done predictively, analyzing what the consumer wants and therefore designing and delivering more closely to their needs in real time. This is especially helpful to personalize the purchasing process, which reduces decision-making time both for developers and consumers.
Whether tracking the latest topics and trends, what styles and colours are trending, or what competitors are offering, customer insights are essential to pinpoint how to integrate data across the business. This way, customers’ needs are integrated at every stage of the production process.
Unfortunately, many legacy systems struggle to scale quickly to achieve this level of customer understanding. Styli uses BigQuery as its data warehouse, and handles massive amounts of information day-to-day, including stock keeping units (SKUs), sales, transactions, customer information and touchpoints, and more. BigQuery’s ability to scale enables Styli’s analytics teams to extract and analyze data effectively and create dashboards for better business decisions in very short development cycles. This enables Styli to respond quickly to market changes and scale accordingly.
Since collaborating with Google Cloud, Styli has grown three-fold, and they’re working to future-proof an industry that many consider unpredictable, exploring tools like Discovery AI for Retail to optimize the Styli site search experience. "With Google Cloud, our tech is set for the next five years," says Priyadarshani. "We have the data to understand what is selling where, in what quantity, what’s the right category mix, the right price elasticity—we can understand the entire supply chain." With the right cloud solutions in place, Styli is ready to expand across new territories and regions, leading the learning curve of cloud tech in fashion ecommerce.
"With Google Cloud, our tech is set for the next five years. We have the data to understand what is selling where, in what quantity, what’s the right category mix, the right price elasticity—we can understand the entire supply chain."
—Pragyan Priyadarshani, CTO, StyliTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Styli
Styli is an ecommerce hub for top-quality trending fashion with competitive prices. After just a few years, it now offers 25,000+ styles for men, women, and kids, sourced from across the globe. Styli currently services markets in four countries - KSA, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain - with plans to expand to India.