Matthew Mayes FRSA

The tablet PC is a consumer technology at the confluence of content, commerce and technology. In 2012, M&S wanted to get their 244 page home furnishings print catalogue onto a tablet PC and enable M&S customers to shop in an integrated shopping experience whilst retaining the print catalogue’s inspiration to buy. As there was no existing software as a service platform on the market, we built one for them.

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Working with a small development team in London we quickly established a robust technical architecture. The key technical challenge was integrating into the M&S E-commerce system. This in itself was not too complicated, but the individual ‘T’ product codes did not always match the inventory that was photographed for the catalogue, months earlier. This was the first time that the catalogue had been integrated into the E-commerce back end and exposed inconsistencies in the data.

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Fortunately we had a low cost offshore technical team who could manually check each product to ensure the catalogue app had accurate product and stock information.

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The first month saw over 160,000 downloads of the Autumn edition. As well as significant E-commerce sales, there was a 20% increase in store traffic attributed to the App with significant reductions in the number of printed catalogues required.

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The M&S Home Furnishings App was also briefly Number One App in the UK App Store.

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Role and responsibilities: Strategy, Information Architecture, Offshore Team Management and Design Direction

Born Group 2012