Red Badger believes delivering an effective pitch to clients means showing them results, not talking about them. Red Badger had the opportunity to pitch for a project to completely rebuild a new eCommerce store for Fortnum & Mason. A written proposal doesn’t go far enough to prove the capability to deliver, so rather than respond in the traditional way by submitting a proposal to the board - Red Badger wanted to show what could be achieved rapidly by building a working prototype storefront.
After reviewing many eCommerce options Red Badger came to the conclusion that Spree Commerce was the best and most progressive platform. The Spree platform is built on open standards and is fully modular, so you can quickly modify the software as you see fit. It is very simple for a team with Ruby skills, with no prior knowledge of Spree, to get up and running with developing an eCommerce site.
So Red Badger decided to build an eCommerce storefront based on Spree from scratch, in a two-day hackathon so that they could present a working product to the board of Fortnum's. Fortnum's were invited to participate. The objectives of the hackathon were twofold. First for us to prove Spree to be a viable solution. Second, to prove our capability to Fortnum's, they could view our ways of working first hand, look at the code we had developed and view the designs.
This is how we did the hackathon...
The first activity was to put a team together. The point of a hackathon is that you deliver the project as if you would any other, it’s just distilled into a smaller timeframe. So, we had a PM, UX, Visual Designer, Developers and a Tester all working together to build a fully responsive end-to-end store over the two days.
10:00 - After plenty of bacon for breakfast, we shaped the weekend by painting a brief. This was a short presentation with an overview of what we were trying to achieve and why.
11:00 - Brainstorm session to make a plan of action: Define an MVP, Plan for UX/Design Tasks, and Resource Allocation.
12:00- Pizza and beer arrive which became our fuel for the next day and a half.
12:30 - Start Hacking
There were a number of parallel tasks that were happening from this moment onward. These break down into the following areas:
19:00 - At the end of day one, we reviewed where we were. The outputs so far were:
20:00 - End of day beers
9:30 - Day 2 was primarily focused on getting the configuration of Spree complete, integrating Spree Storefront with an instance of Spree Hub (now called Wombat) for mock payments and SMS messaging, as well as getting the responsive front-end built.
At the end of the day the outputs were:
18:30 - We all had dinner together
19:30 - A full demo of the completed product
The end result was a really impressive end-to-end demo that had a great user experience on multiple platforms and had the same look and feel as Fortnum's current site with all of their products available for purchase.
In only two days, Red Badger produced a clean-looking, fully-functional eCommerce storefront that both Spree and Red Badger could showcase to Fortnum's board, who were bowled over by this innovative approach to fulfilling their brief.
The approach was a huge success and Red Badger won the project. Within 6 months the new Fortnum's' store was in live beta with a full switch over just 2 months later. The new Fortnum website can be viewed here.