DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Launching a Flagship eCommerce Site with Drupal and Drupal Commerce
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 01/10/2014

Speakers: ikos
Lush is a UK based company that produces ethical and natural handmade cosmetics. They have over 900 stores in more than 50 countries and an annual turnover exceeding $600m

What?
The Lush Digital team has a vision of creating a Content Driven Commerce website where the stories and campaigns of the company are strongly linked with the products offered. Drupal and Drupal Commerce were selected as the ideal framework for fulfilling this vision.

How?
The branding and design of the website was being developed at the same time as the Drupal build was in progress so we used an agile development process with the design team ahead by one sprint. This allowed us to adapt the build as the design evolved.

One of the key success factors was developing the theme of the site in a Jekyll powered Style guide (or pattern guide). This enabled us to prototype and prove the design before moving to Drupal.

We developed an automated build process allowing a full site build on the development server each night.

Why?
Lush were developing a new digital platform for delivery across multiple regions. The UK site was the first of these to be rolled out. The site was intended to deliver the new company brand and experience across multiple devices.

Delivering Content and Commerce on a single platform was one of the deciding factors in selecting Drupal.

Who?
This project was developed by i-KOS in partnership with Method (Digital Agency), CommerceGuys (Technical Partner), Acquia (Infrastructure and Technical Partner).

When?
Development started in August 2013 with the first phase going live on 1st April 2014.

Result?
The site launched successfully 1st April and was a featured site in on www.awwwards.com and econsultancy.com.

This session highlights some of the approaches and systems used to develop the website and deconstructs the project to reveal some of the lessons learned.

In particular, we will talk about:

Using a live style guide for prototyping and theme development
Achieving complex page layouts in Drupal
Integration with third party systems - where best of breed can trump roll your own
Solr powered catalogues
Performance challenges
Finally we will discuss some of the key lessons that we hope will be beneficial to you when working on large scale multi-partner projects.