Cambridge Satchel Company's plans to become a £100m business: an interview with CTO Jonny Wooldridge
'I'm not just the geek in the corner doing what marketing tells me to; I'm trying to stay ahead of what marketing might need,' he tells Computing
The Cambridge Satchel Company has grown quickly since it was founded by Julie Deane in her kitchen during the summer of 2008 with a budget of just £600.
Seven years on and the independent leather bag business is a global fashion brand with a flagship store in Covent Garden and sales of over £10m a year.
And the company has ambitious plans to become even bigger, according to chief technology officer Jonny Wooldridge.
Wooldridge was brought into Cambridge Satchel Company from Marks & Spencer in September 2014 "to grow the business from £10m to £100m over the next four years", he tells Computing.
However, he was under no illusion that overseeing the firm's global retail technology transformation was going to be simple.
"Clearly with the technology they had that wasn't going to be possible. They were doing well on the systems they had but they couldn't scale, so I came in to see what it would take to build the foundations for a £100m company," says Wooldridge.
A key element of his strategy was to ensure that he was driving innovation as a "proactive force", rather than a reactive one.
"My background is as a software engineer, so I'm very much focused on innovation around development," he explains.
"I'm not just the geek in the corner doing what marketing tells me to; I'm trying to stay ahead of what marketing might need, looking at the market to find appropriate tools and to build the right things to stay one step ahead."
It was for that reason that Wooldridge decided to rebuild Cambridge Satchel Company's website on Demandware's enterprise cloud commerce platform.
When Wooldridge joined the firm it was two months until Black Friday, the busiest and biggest online retail day of the year, and he was determined to ensure that Cambridge Satchel Company had new backend infrastructure by then.
However, even Demandware was unsure if the whole platform could be revamped in that time, but Wooldridge remained confident.
"What if I could find the best people in an Ocean's 11 scenario and just go for it? I didn't see why that wasn't possible," he explains. The project was a success, with the platform installed and running in 57 days, a new record for Demandware integration, and it paid dividends.
"We went live a week before Black Friday and immediately it worked fine and on Black Friday we were three times the revenue of the previous year," Wooldridge says.
Demandware was selected because Wooldridge had had good experience with the platform in his previous role as head of web engineering at Marks & Spencer. "It worked really well," he says.
"I needed a best-of-breed platform that can scale, but looking at the market I wanted a cloud platform. That was non-negotiable, everything I'm doing is cloud based and I'd had a good experience. I was confident the site would scale on the day and it would cope."
That ability to scale has meant Demandware architecture has helped Cambridge Satchel Company at other times when there's been a surge in online shoppers.
"Last week we had a sale and it was bigger than Black Friday and we hadn't anticipated that," says Wooldridge, adding that despite the surprise, there was no panic.
"It was a wow moment. It wasn't ‘we're on fire, bring out the hose and turn off features'. It's nice not to have to worry and we can focus our team on building new features," he says.
The Cambridge Satchel Company also has much of its infrastructure built on Amazon Web Servers "for auto-scaling" and Wooldridge tells Computing how he couldn't see any reason to invest in hardware when low-cost cloud services are so freely available.
"Why would you not do that? Of course you'd do that. Infrastructure is relatively cheap, there's new features all the time on Amazon, so we just went ahead and built something. What we've built can scale to the £100m we need," he says.
"It's about choice of technology, making sure we're not building a monolithic legacy beast, we're keeping things simple," he adds.
The use of agile infrastructure ties in with one of Wooldridge's key ideologies; that legacy isn't about how old the IT infrastructure is, but whether it's fit for purpose.
"Legacy isn't dependent on age and it's not something in the past, it's potentially something you build today; and a lot of companies are currently building a pile of rubbish that is actually legacy," he says.
"Legacy is something that's difficult to change, that few people understand because it's complicated. You could be building that now," he adds.
However, Wooldridge is ensuring Cambridge Satchel Company takes a different approach to building and testing its systems.
"We're trying to make it easy to maintain, easy to test, easy to recruit people to code and take it forward, which is not creating legacy."
Bagging the right staff
For Cambridge Satchel Company to be successful going forward it needs to ensure it has the right technology staff and Wooldridge explains that he'd rather pay higher wages for the best employees than hire large numbers of less skilled ones.
"My pitch was I'm going to create a decoupled architecture so we can pull bits of the system out in future. I'm going to have a few people, but they're probably going to be expensive because they're going to be really good at what they do," he says. "Rather than have 20 mediocre people, I'd have three very good people."
And with skilled, flexible staff comes the ability to harness the power of DevOps, an area Wooldridge keenly espouses the virtues of for enabling agility in development.
"DevOps is just professional software development. It's about allowing everybody to get software out as fast as possible and with as much quality as possible," he tells Computing.
"It doesn't mean you're just chucking stuff out there and hoping it works; the operations people are involved with the development team early on so they understand what is needed in the operational world, what metrics they can look at to see if it's performing," Wooldridge continues.
However, he points out that DevOps isn't something for every organisation and some, especially larger firms with ageing systems and processes, may not find it to be as simple as it appears.
"If you've got a really good team and you've got really good technology, you can be this pinnacle of DevOps. If you've got hokey technology and your team is outsourced and they don't care, then you're going to struggle," he says.
The focus on agility and DevOps plays into what Wooldridge calls his catchphrase, "It's all about the code", so it's important that Cambridge Satchel Company technology staff at all levels of the process are familiar with the software.
"Our definition of engineer isn't just developers, it's testers as well. Testers are writing the code to test it, so that for me is critical. If you've got testers who just start testing manually at the end of the process, that's the wrong way of doing it, they need to be involved from the very beginning," he says.
It's that sort of approach that means agility is at the heart of how Cambridge Satchel Company approaches its technology strategy.
"The speed of change of creating software now is a greater factor of magnitude than it was even just a couple of years ago," Wooldridge says, before describing how the firm has an advantage over larger retailers, because its relatively small team can react more rapidly to developments in technology.
"We have speed of innovation that other companies don't have, because even to make a small colour change on a tablet app, they've got to go through 10 different committees to get it done," he says.
That's why, despite The Cambridge Satchel Company's plans for worldwide growth, Wooldridge doesn't want the technology operation to ever abandon its start-up mentality. "We never want to lose it," he says.