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Bru TextilesHeadless customer portal for a leading global supplier of interior furnishing fabrics
Bru Textiles
POC Development | Development | Technical direction & guidance
Fastly | Sitecore | Gatsby | Terraform
Azure | React | ODS (API)
How a composable architecture and a headless CMS are the basis of exponential results
Bru Textiles is a leading global supplier of interior furnishing fabrics, including upholstery, curtains and drapery. Bru Textiles has a drive to innovate and keep an open mind towards the future. They strive to constantly be on the lookout for innovative ideas that inspire others.
How it started: “Can we gradually transition to a headless customer portal?”
The IT team at Bru Textiles was ready to transition their existing customer portal to a headless one in a gradual way. The new portal would combine pages from both the traditional CMS of Sitecore and the new headless content from Sitecore while slowly swapping out the old pages for the new ones.
How it turned out: a multi-branded headless customer portal platform
The solution had to overcome some complex challenges such as customer specific content, flexible branding and complex product searches to be performed using an intuitive and performant UI.
Take a look at the public version of the Bru portalDerived portals had to be setup; campaign specific websites had to be rolled out as quickly as possible.
We updated the infrastructure to support a multi-brand multi-tenant set-up, we extended the component library already in progress, and we adjusted the project approach to support all aspects of this.
"We chose Two Point O for their strong technical knowledge and ability to work together with our internal development team in a way we could have never imagined. The ability to play the role of implementation partner as well as an educational partner. I can confidently say that Two Point O's work laid the foundations of our new frontend strategy that we’re very happy with." - Robin A., Team lead at Bru Textiles
What we worked on
Front-end education & strategy
We’ve educated Bru Textiles' internal development team to ensure they were fully onboarded with react as a frontend framework. We’ve also set up a base architecture and framework for all frontend projects at Bru Textiles. The new framework introduced react as the main frontend framework and includes a component library that provides all kind of frontend components for multiple projects at Bru Textiles now.
Extensive complex filtering engine
With a product portfolio like Bru Textiles', it is a hard puzzle to display the right product to the right customer in the portal. To support these complex searches, we created a custom filter engine that fetches the account profile on one hand, the product filter values on the other, and then uses the configuration and filter labels from Sitecore to bring everything together.
Experience editor
The default Sitecore CMS comes with a visual Experience Editor. One of the initial requirements of the project was that the Bru Textiles team wanted to combine headless content management with a custom Sitecore Experience Editor. While it was cut from the project later, the team was able to successfully replicate that experience through a custom React engine - a feat that we can be proud to say won us the trust and confidence of the Bru Textiles team.
Modern security measures
As with any internal closed-off platform, security needs to be top-notch. Using a security wall, secured cookies, a token shielder, a reverse proxy that shields all API calls and static site rendering the platform is protected in many different ways to make sure no information is shared anywhere that is publicly accessible.
Two Point O is a very knowledgeable and flexible company with likewise consultants. The people we worked with brought their experience to the table which had formed their opinion on web development. Nevertheless, they were not there to force their opinions on anyone. The consultants on this project were fully part of the team. We never had a we vs them feeling, it was us against the challenges of the project. They listened carefully to our needs and together we implemented the best solutions.
Robin A.
Team lead
at Bru Textiles