Increased query speed and reliability of databases and saved costs with no slowdown during peak holiday shopping
Built a cloud environment now able to handle a 10x spike in volume, performance, and reliability
Multi-brand retailer URBN chose Google Cloud to empower employee creativity and serve shoppers globally with great experiences.
Multi-brand retailer URBN chose Google Cloud to empower employee creativity and serve shoppers globally with great experiences.
Powering modern style with modernized infrastructure
Global retailer URBN is the parent company of popular brands like Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, and Free People. To bring fresh looks to customers with fast ordering time, URBN continually assesses areas of its infrastructure for modernization.
“Our technology organization has a very broad remit, and we tend to punch way over our weight class and go after ambitious goals,” says Rob Frieman, CIO at URBN. “We’ve built a combination of strong innovation and having the courage to go fast, but also understanding when to adjust course,” says Freeman.
Across URBN, a majority of the products brought to market are created in-house. That includes everything from early product planning through lifecycle development, conceptual design, and creative design—all of which need fast, reliable back-end infrastructure. Frieman’s team has built their own ecommerce platform as well as a significant data science practice.
“We hire the most creative people in the world. They want to come to URBN to create the most beautiful products that people are going to want to buy.” says Frieman. “We want to empower associates with the tools that help them.”
We want to make sure that we've got the tools and capabilities that allow us to bring products to market as quickly as possible, to enable the best customer experiences and keep our associates as productive as they can be.
Rob Frieman
Chief Information Officer, URBN
URBN relies on Google Cloud to power much of its infrastructure, and recently migrated critical workloads to AlloyDB, as well as adding Workspace and Gemini AI.
“Our initial move into Google Cloud was based on a need for resiliency and performance,” says Frieman. “We wanted to position our applications for ecommerce, for digital products, for data and analytics into multi-region, high availability environments.”
From their initial Google Cloud infrastructure, Frieman and team worked closely with Google Cloud experts to explore each next set of workloads and capabilities to decide what to add next.
Tailoring a database environment for URBN shoppers during peak season
URBN recently updated some of its vintage databases with a shift to AlloyDB after having moved its ecommerce workloads and a significant amount of data analytics onto Google Cloud.
With cloud databases, “we saw the opportunity, we saw the flexibility,” says Frieman, “and we saw the financials, and the ability to have a really significant return on our spend in an effective way.”
The migration brought a critical workload—URBN’s order management system—onto Google Cloud’s AlloyDB, a fully managed PostgreSQL-compatible database that’s designed for mission-critical workloads.
Order management is the sort of thing you don’t want anyone to think about. If it becomes visible, we’re not doing our jobs and customer experiences are impacted. Having it on AlloyDB, it’s rock solid, and in addition to that reliability, we’re seeing the speed of queries improve.
Rob Frieman
Chief Information Officer, URBN
“We had spent a tremendous amount of effort to ensure we had the app resourced at the appropriate level on-prem based on the prior year,” says Frieman. “That’s expensive. It’s difficult. At the crux of it, you’re still going to have some of those classic on-prem limitations.”
The first step was partnering with Google and the order management system app provider to identify what needed to be updated and decide how best to shift a decade of stored procedures and other detailed database application layer functions. To ensure seamless holiday shopping for all its customers, the team had to ensure that systems could handle at least a 10x spike in volume, performance, and reliability.
“We built a migration plan to be able to migrate in a repeated way to test, learn, and iterate in that new environment,” says Frieman, “so that when we went live, we went live seamlessly.”
As the retail peak approached, URBN’s team called on Google’s databases product team to help size their environment and ensure they were allocated enough AlloyDB resources. That critical assistance made sure that URBN’s systems scaled quickly without queuing.
“This was the first year through the holidays we ran our order management through Google Cloud on AlloyDB, and it was flawless,” says Frieman. “Our goal is that systems like this should be boring even through the peak, and that’s what we got. We’re very pleased with how it performed during peak.”
URBN has seen continued improvement even after holiday shopping subsided. Some of the longest running queries are now outperforming in measurable speed now that they’re on AlloyDB.
In addition to data solutions, the tech team at URBN solves core logistics, product positioning, and shipping optimization challenges with Google’s compute, TPUs, and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
“These optimization schemes are driven on NAF [a type of neural acquisition method using synthetic data],” says Frieman, “and that’s really one of the first ways we dove into working with Google and AI.”
Outfitting teams with embedded AI
Working closely with Google Cloud as a partner brought new ideas about tech innovation to Frieman and team, which kicked off conversations about using AI-powered collaboration tool Workspace. URBN has now adopted Workspace for companywide use.
“Having Gemini as an easily accessible and key component in our day-to-day workload has been really critical,” says Frieman. Beyond the collaboration capabilities, Workspace also provides URBN’s employees the ability to search Google Drive for years’ worth of valuable data.
“Our decision to move forward with Workspace was in part driven by Gemini and the embedded AI capabilities throughout,” says Frieman. “That’s a critical component for every one of our associates to use the best tools at their disposal to bring products to market.”
The adoption of any new technology is going to supplant and disrupt something that already exists. Think about how you're going to take that preexisting capability and bring that into the future or decide that it's a capability or a set of steps that can be streamlined.
Rob Frieman
Chief Information Officer, URBN
That means exploring how Workspace and AI can amplify individual efforts within URBN using AI. Depending on the role, that could be generating AI summaries, enhancing seamless collaboration, improving presentations, and otherwise simplifying day-to-day components of associates’ work at URBN’s offices and stores.
Ensuring that everyone in the company can deliver for customers at the peak of their ability is core to the technology team’s remit, and new tools like AI fit that goal. Frieman recommends open-mindedness as core to implementing successful tech initiatives.
“As you consider adopting AI or any new technology, know who you are as a company,” he says. “Understand where the opportunities could reside, and from there you need to adopt experimentation and innovation. That was part of the URBN DNA well before there were these capabilities.”
Since 1970, with its first store, URBN has brought unique, creative fashion experiences to customers through its retail stores and consumer brands that include Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, FP Movement, Nuuly, Terrain, and Menus & Venues.
Industry: Retail
Location: Philadelphia
Products: AlloyDB, Gemini, NotebookLM, MongoDB Atlas, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Workspace
