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Case study · Luxury Fashion

Embedded Engineering for an Enterprise Luxury Fashion Brand

An enterprise luxury fashion retailer needed senior engineering capacity that operated like an in-house team — across Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager, and Java services — without the cost of expanding in-house headcount.

Salesforce Commerce CloudSalesforce Commerce CloudAdobe Experience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerJava / Spring BootJava / Spring BootAWSAWSJenkinsJenkins

Project details

Client
Enterprise luxury fashion retailer (under NDA)
Industry
Luxury Fashion
Services
Embedded Engineering · Headless Content / CMS · Platform Migration
Timeline
Multi-year continuous engagement
Year
2022–ongoing

The challenge

What we walked into.

An enterprise luxury fashion retailer was running a critical commerce stack across a commerce platform, an enterprise CMS, and Java services — three platforms, three vendor pools, three disconnected priorities. Every release required cross-vendor coordination calls. Every incident triggered finger-pointing.

The brand needed senior engineering capacity that operated like an in-house team — not a transactional vendor that left as soon as the SOW closed. Project-based work had created a graveyard of half-finished features and an institutional-knowledge drain every time a contract ended.

Hiring 15 senior engineers to bring the work in-house was off the table — the cost-per-engineer math did not work for a fashion-tier P&L. They needed a partner that could embed, scale up and down by season, and stay long enough that the second year of the engagement was cheaper than the first.

What we built

The engineering decisions.

Embedded multi-disciplinary pod

We staffed a single pod across Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) engineers, AEM authors, Java backend, QA, and devops. Same standups as the brand's in-house team, same Jira board, same on-call rotation. The brand's engineering manager runs the pod day to day — Destm provides the people and the practice depth, not the management layer.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud — modernization, not replacement

The SFCC storefront was 4 years deep in custom cartridges. We did not propose a replatform — we cleaned. Cartridge-by-cartridge refactors for performance, B2C Commerce migration where it earned its way, and a custom test harness so SFCC code stopped being a black box.

Adobe Experience Manager — headless authoring

AEM was the editorial home for the brand's storytelling. We rebuilt the content delivery layer to publish AEM content via headless API to the SFCC storefront and to native mobile, so the editorial team writes once and ships everywhere — instead of duplicating across surfaces.

Capacity that breathes with the season

Luxury fashion has 4 seasons and 3 collections per season. The pod expands by 30 to 40% in Q3 (holiday + spring collection prep) and contracts in Q1. Same people, same context — only the headcount flexes. That is impossible with project-based vendors.

The results

Measured outcomes.

  • Multi-year continuous partnership with zero re-onboarding cost
  • Storefront releases shipped on the brand's 2-week cadence with no vendor handoff overhead
  • Single team across SFCC, AEM, Java, and QA — no cross-vendor blame loops
  • Capacity scaled up and down by season without rehiring or losing context

The engineering behind this

Luxury CommerceThe vertical this work sits in.Headless CommerceThe composable architecture behind it.Embedded EngineeringHow the pod model actually runs.

Next case study

Multi-Generation Platform Modernization for a US Gifting Brand

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