From legacy to agility: How Boden empowered teams and accelerated growth through Shopify

Boden is a British fashion brand known for its colourful, quality, long-lasting clothing and timeless style. With a global presence and loyal customer base, Boden prides itself on delivering joyful clothes rooted in creativity and craftsmanship.

Ana Machado da Silva, Senior Head of Product Management and Experience at Boden, joined the British fashion brand during a period of immense transformation. Boden needed to evolve digitally to meet the demands of modern e-commerce while maintaining its signature customer charm.

At the heart of this transformation was a move to Shopify—a migration that Ana describes as both transformational and liberating.

Challenge: Empowering the business to move faster

Boden had long relied on a custom-built ecommerce engine with integrations to multiple platforms that provided specialist functionality. While it had supported the business through years of growth, it was increasingly becoming a blocker.

Boden’s goals were clear:

• Empower teams across product, engineering, and ecommerce to deliver faster
• Reduce reliance on multiple platforms for the customer experience
• Leverage out of the box Shopify platform features and the app marketplace to create new shopping experiences

But the path to this new world wasn’t just about technology, it was about culture.

Solution: Migration as a catalyst for culture shift

Partnering with Shopify, Boden launched a comprehensive ecommerce replatforming initiative designed to modernise its digital stack and unlock new levels of agility.

“We saw the migration as an opportunity to break away from old ways of working,” Ana explains.

With Shopify’s intuitive admin, flexible storefront APIs, and customisable checkout, the dev, product and ecommerce teams were able to accelerate their development cycles, recreating unique brand experiences as well as making changes coming from the customer UX tests, with minimal engineering overhead. They also leveraged Shopify’s robust app ecosystem to explore different options to improve the customer experience — all without the need for heavy custom builds.

“We were able to retain our heavily visual and immersive brand experience on the website which previously took months to build and did it in weeks.”

Thanks to Shopify’s extensibility and out-of-the-box optimisations, Boden could streamline legacy backend operations and evaluate different solutions for the integrations across the customer experience and internal tech stack. “Shopify gave us the freedom to assess and test into opportunities without fear." says Ana.

Ana notes that this mindset shift was one of the biggest wins. Her product and experience teams were no longer gatekept by backend bottlenecks. Instead, they were free to innovate, explore new UX patterns, and be truly customer-obsessed.

Results: Agility and ownership across the business

The migration didn’t just result in a more flexible website - it changed how Boden operated.

Product managers began launching features in days instead of months. Internal teams had more control over on-site content and promotions as well as improved product data for outfits and merchandising. And perhaps most importantly, Boden could react quickly and frequently to customer behaviour on the website from user tests and analytics. Boden also scaled their organic reach and marketing messages. “We saw immediate benefits from being on a platform that has an optimal approach and scalability at the heart of it - our SEO visibility ramped up in our key markets and we can now bulk send communications to our customers without worrying about the website performance." states Sarah Chambers, Head of Ecommerce at Boden.

Looking ahead, Ana sees Shopify not just as a vendor, but as a partner in Boden’s long-term growth.