Winning with MACH:Levi’s

Companies need to transform the way they do business, rapidly. In some cases, they need to transform completely in order to become more responsive, agile and to stay competitive. Faced with increasing competition, unprecedented disruption and constant innovation, brands need to invest in a modern approach to enterprise architectures and build next generation platforms if they want to stay above water. Standing for microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless technologies, MACH is a set of architectural principles that put flexibility, agility and the pursuit of better business outcomes at the forefront of technical solutions.

• Microservices: Single pieces of business functionality that can be individually designed / deployed, leading to faster development and release cycles.
• API-first: Exposing functionalities through APIs, enabling the flow of data between microservices and acting as the ‘glue’ to link it all together.
• Cloud Native: For on demand access and unrivalled scalability. Making it easy to expand your reach across regions and channels and provide a better customer experience.
• Headless: The ability to deliver amazing front-end experiences without getting distracted by the back-end architectures. Freeing you up to respond rapidly to changing market conditions.

When I first met with Levi's it was at their headquarters in San Francisco. When you walk into the lobby, you're immediately hit with an actual tailor working on garments. You hear the sewing machine and smell the cut denim. It emphasized that Levi's is a very physical and tangible brand. This concerned me at first as we never want to insert technology where it might not fit.

But after the first 10 minutes in our first meeting I knew it wasn’t going to be a problem and they got it. Technology is an enabler and if used in the right way would bring their very physical product, clothing, closer to customers. With better product customizations and storytelling, we could make something as simple as buying blue jeans an experience.

Immediately we latched on to the idea of enabling the unique and cool human interaction customers get with tailors. But Levi’s has a lot of stores all over the world with various level of infrastructure and customer touch points. Not all stores can have iPads so a headless solution that could work with iPads, the web, and whatever comes in the future made the most sense.

At launch the solution is on iPads. But because of the MACH architect new frontends for ecommerce or mobile are easy to add. That’s what was so powerful about the MACH approach.

We created The Tailor Shop concept to make the most of the power of the personalized experience within traditional retail. Building on Connected Experience principles and MACH technologies we delivered an in-store tailoring service that took the store from a simple space to a memorable and emotive experience. By transforming the customer experience we’re increasing consumer loyalty, brand affinity and taking a competitive advantage.

Levi’s came to Valtech looking to create in-store digital experiences that would inspire, educate and convert shoppers with their new ‘Tailor Shop’ offering. The vision was to curate unique, localised offerings and to create a tool that would enable store tailors to provide a better customer experience, across languages, content and product resources.

When we think of creating Connected Experiences, we are always looking for ways to remove friction from an experience, to make the customer journey completely seamless and to thoughtfully guide customers from inspiration to purchase. By combining digital with physical spaces, we unlock the brand potential from both directions – physically immersing our customers into a space that we can tailor to live and breathe the brand, whilst giving them all of the digital tools to make the experience multidimensional, simple, smart and memorable.

We created an international in-store, interactive digital experience that stripped everything back to the basics. We wanted to unleash the creative potential of Levi’s garments and develop an experience that would elicit emotion at every touchpoint.

The Tailor Shop iPad application oozes craft: it feels worn, it feels creative and inspiring. The garments are front and centre, allowing the custom designs to tell the story of self-expression. Exploration of magnified details allows guests to appreciate the personalised touches along with the intricacies of Levi’s fit, fabric, and finish.

We rolled out the first MVP phase of the digital experience in time for the holidays at Levi’s Times Square flagship store and have since added in additional features and store locations including Shanghai and Milan.

This beautifully customised digital experience blurs the lines between the digital and physical world, giving customers the finer details that inspired the full range of localised tailoring options. As time goes by, we’re testing and designing new features of our own, making sure that this personalised delivery keeps the experience frictionless, and the denim timeless.

By utilizing a headless CMS, the entire content, curation, and delivery pipeline can be constructed in a platform-agnostic approach. That allowed our team to deliver highly customized image submission, categorization, and consumption rapidly and in terms that makes most sense for the involved software platforms.

Valtech has always been a MACH Company. Being a Digital Transformation Agency, the agile way of planning, setting up and then managing a  MACHified  technology platform runs in our DNA. We strongly believe in MACH. To  underline that, Valtech has become one of 14 founding members of the MACH Alliance, a non-profit co-operative organization that aims to promote the benefits of  truly open, composable ecosystems. 

Learn more about the Mach Alliance here