Hotter Shoes replatform to Remarkable in record time

Background…

Well-known Skelmersdale shoe company Hotter Shoes has been bought by the Woolovers group - a deal was finally struck between Interpath Advisory (Hotter's restructuring firm) and Woolovers in August 2023. Sadly, Hotter Shoes had been struggling for some time and in May announced that a £10m investment from Marwyn Investment Management had fallen through.

Woolovers, which is owned by Verdane, a European investment firm, purchased the brand and is looking to turn around the brand’s performance.

Hotter Shoes currently trades from 17 standalone stores and just under 10 concessions in garden centres. Hotter is a well-known brand among women and men, renowned for its comfort and high-quality footwear.

The previous Hotter website technology stack consisted of many third-party microservices based on 'state of the art' headless technologies. This composable technology stack was not fit for purpose, and Woolovers needed to quickly move the eCommerce off these composable solutions to help bring costs down, save their 27 stores and prevent redundancies of its 400+ workforce. 

The third parties on the old site were a mixture of diverse technologies and large consultancies, all with separate licensing contracts. The eCommerce storefront essentially relied on all of these to keep the old site alive. A failure, or licensing/contract problem with any of these would lead to operational issues impacting the online business.

Replatform project…

It was therefore crucial that Remarkable replatformed Hotter efficiently and quickly onto their RCM  platform. With time being crucial, contracts were temporarily extended with all the third parties just long enough for the replatform to happen, however, there was always a constant threat that these could break at any moment leaving the website vulnerable. 

Woolovers asked Remarkable to build an MVP based on the existing Woolovers ‘Bloom’ platform version, with the CMS (Content Management System) utilising Remarkable’s native RCM platform and Adyen payment gateway integration. Remarkable Commerce have now re-launched Hotter onto the Remarkable platform following a successful existing relationship with Woolovers and all their brands.

The new storefront was required to be connected to the wider WoolOvers group technology ecosystem, which includes a central admin portal for their team to manage the site. Their ecosystem also includes a PIM and OMS solution, which were internally built and internally managed. 

The total project length for the new storefront, including the integrations, was 7 weeks. Remarkable Commerce achieved this by assigning additional project resources and by sticking tightly to a project timeline.

Performance…

Remarkable is delighted to share that the new Hotter site is performing stronger than their previous site and initial stats are looking strong. In the coming months, they will complete and share a full review of the improvements. 

The Woolovers team are now able to effectively and efficiently manage the brand within their existing technology stack and focus on growing their customer conversion rate.

Visit the new site here: https://www.hotter.com/