Made.com
What if you don’t need a full team of developers all year round? Some businesses need to add people only during their peak months.
Source: Shutterstock / Author: AlexRoz
Take Made.com: this online design furniture retailer based in London, England doesn’t need as many developers at the end of the year. But scaling down is hard to do in-house. In some jurisdictions, France for example, one can’t even lay off people for two months. That’s why Made.com—like many others—needs to rely on a responsive team on the outside.
“The company needed the flexibility to adjust its payroll to the needs of the moment,” explains Dan Deusan, IT Consultant and Project Director with Pentalog.
Outsourcing is a flexible, cost-effective way to solve the problem, as Made.com has found out by working with Pentalog.
ABOUT MADE.COM
The business model of Made.com, created in 2010, is based on the idea of selling furniture directly from the makers, with no warehouses, no physical store, and no go-betweens, to offer top-quality products at affordable prices.
In 2013, Made.com was also successfully launched in France and Italy.
THE CHALLENGE
Made.com wanted to create a website—Made Unboxed—to put its customers in touch with the Made.com community (business actors and other clients who have acquired Made.com products) to allow them gathering information about the products (pictures, reviews, etc.).
The site Made Unboxed comes in addition to the London physical Showroom where potential customers can “touch” products sold on Made.com. Its goal is to improve the web shop conversion rate. To create Made Unboxed, the young company needed to set up a team, which would work on this project without becoming a burden on its permanent costs.
THE SOLUTION
That’s when Pentalog came. The solution provided Made.com was entirely developed by a Pentalog dedicated team of 6 engineers based in Iasi (Romania). The client product owner and designer provided all the needed information, and the development and testing activities took place in Iasi.
THE RESULTS
The Made Unboxed site is responsive and supports the all the main browsers and platforms: Chrome, Firefox, Safari latest version, IE—8, 9, 10, 11 and devices desktop Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android.
The application was developed using the Scrum methodology, is scalable and deployed on cloud infrastructures.
The implementation was initially planned to be done using the Social Engine (SE) framework, and the first version had to be ready after two months.
After the first sprint, the Pentalog team proposed to switch to Symfony, which was better suited to reach the MVP within deadlines. Their initiative and strong commitment to catch up with the first lost sprint allowed to arrive at the MVP as initially planned.
The project continues with refinements and new functionalities.
For Made.com, working with Pentalog provides a way to accelerate development when needed, without the burden of a full-time development team to support.
FOR MORE INFO
Do you want to inject a dose of flexibility in your development capacity? Contact us!