Industry: Fine jewelry & luxury retail
Team size: 22 specialists at peak
Duration: 31 months
Engagement model: Multi-vendor replatforming with 15+ integrations
A distinguished British luxury jeweler partnered with us to replace a decade-old SAP Hybris platform with a modern, composable architecture featuring 15 external integrations, all while existing ecommerce trade continued without interruption. The goal was to deliver a faster, more flexible omnichannel experience ahead of a fixed September 2025 launch.
The delivery challenge: Replatforming while everything keeps moving
The core challenge was to rebuild the digital commerce platform without pausing change on the legacy Hybris site. The delivery team had to:
- Maintain functional parity between Hybris and the new composable stack, including a major redesign initiative for a key luxury partner that had to be delivered on both platforms.
- Coordinate with more than 15 vendors and integration partners, each with its own processes and lead times.
- Manage shifting requirements, taking on five major change requests and a large backlog of additional scope in the final six months. Critical-path integrations added extra complexity across hosting, payments, and commerce services.
Grid Dynamics mobilised a first class team, […] and brought their best people to share their experience and deliver a first class product. With oversight of the end architecture, they managed the cross dependencies and orchestrated the implementation, achieving a connected and truly omni commerce experience. I’m proud of the collaboration with Grid Dynamics, together we’ve built a solid foundation to delivering our future digital growth.
Delivery strategy and framework: Consistently controlling complexity
The program followed a Scrum-based Agile approach with two-week sprints, using regular planning, reviews, retrospectives, and backlog refinement to keep priorities clear as the scope changed. A structured governance model (daily standups, weekly demos and analysis sessions, a biweekly steering committee, and increasingly frequent go-live planning) kept engineering, business, and vendors aligned around the changing critical path.
Risks and dependencies were tracked in a formal RAID log and reviewed regularly, with proactive escalation when vendor or user acceptance testing (UAT) delays threatened the timeline. When UAT capacity fell behind, QA engineers from the delivery team jumped in to accelerate validation and protect the September launch window.
Technical excellence and automation: CI/CD, observability, and performance readiness
To keep releases on time, the team implemented automated CI/CD pipelines early, with branch policies, checks, and quality gates, supported by linting, tests, and code review workflows. An observability epic introduced structured logging, metrics, and dashboards so application and integration behavior could be monitored in real time instead of relying on late-stage manual checks.
For peak trading readiness, the team developed an internal performance testing framework rather than relying solely on external providers. This gave better control over test scenarios, shorter feedback cycles, and closer alignment between performance results and the architecture actually deployed.
Collaboration and leadership: One team across vendors and platforms
The core delivery team combined backend, frontend, QA, BA, DevOps, UX, and delivery management roles, with around 90% of specialists based in Moldova and the rest in the UK and Spain. The structure included dedicated discipline leads and selective vendor coordination: the team worked directly with key partners such as Vercel, Amplience, commercetools, and Cybersource, while the client managed relationships with the broader vendor ecosystem. This setup supported efficient collaboration across payments, logistics, CMS, hosting, and customer experience integrations.
Delivery culture focused on ownership, transparency, and continuity. Having previously worked on the Hybris platform, the team understood the client’s business context and used the legacy site as a reference point when requirements were unclear. A six-month discovery phase and the continued involvement of business analysts in early build provided a stable foundation, while structured onboarding of new engineers (including former interns) helped maintain knowledge and delivery pace as resources shifted over the life of the program.
Business impact: A controlled go-live on a moving target
September 2025
final go-live goal met
5
major change requests absorbed into scope
15+
vendors and third-party systems integrated
Quantitative and delivery outcomes
By the original February 2025 date, the main replatforming scope was complete: core functionality, parity with the legacy site, and the major integrations were in place, allowing the program to pivot from building to launch preparation. From there, the team navigated two timeline extensions, a heavy late-stage change request wave, and multi-vendor dependencies to reach a September 2025 go-live with no critical issues in production.
The new composable platform now underpins a connected omnichannel experience with modern architecture, automated delivery pipelines, observability, and performance tooling in place.
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