7 years of Web Team love

Happy birthday, Web Team! It’s official — we’re 7. Time to catch our breath for a minute and sum up our story before resuming our epic digital marathon.

As the central, digital division of the phenomenally successful Landmark Group, let’s take a look at what we’ve built during this time and the difference that we’ve made for our many brands and millions of customers.

The Retail E-commerce & Omni-Channel Era (2011 to present)

On December 20th, 2012, after two years of intense effort on strategy, brand, design, development and content production, LandmarkShops officially launched in the UAE as our Group’s official foray into the E-commerce and Omni-Channel space.

On March 31st, 2016, LandmarkShops completed 39 months of live operation. During this time, and in collaboration with our brand, corporate and Management teams, our Web Team delivered 33 launches and milestones including…

Taking 5 more major businesses (Lifestyle, Max, Shoe Mart, Centrepoint and Home Centre) online after our initial 3 (Babyshop, Splash and Emax) and enhancing the shopping experience for each of their respective customers.
Expanding our catalog from just 1,500 products at launch to over 40,000 products today because we know our customers care about a comprehensive offering.
Integrating Shukran, our award-winning loyalty program with over 12M members, so our customers can earn valuable points when shopping online and spend them for instant savings.
Building Omni-Channel one channel at a time — first by launching Returns Via Store which now drives 60% of our 12% overall return rate, then with our mobile responsive site that boosted mobile traffic by 2.5x, followed by our official iPhone, Android and iPad apps that make shopping simpler, faster and more convenient for our customers with these devices.
Launching LandmarkShops in India with a greatly enhanced, fully re-designed and re-engineered experience for household brands Lifestyle and Max with over 10,000 products and a neat Android app on day 1 — this alone took 2.5 years to accomplish and the combined effort of over 200 key stakeholders in 2 countries. By making this happen, we believe that we have significantly enhanced the shopping experience of our entire Indian customer base.
Integrating Landmark Rewards, our 10M+ loyalty programme into LandmarkShops.in, just as we did for our Shukran members in the UAE, and delivering a more valuable and rewarding shopping experience for these customers.

Not all our milestones were customer-facing. The internal improvements we made were also critical factors in our growth story. These include:

Bringing Design and Development in-house dramatically increased quality, more than doubled our productivity and cut costs by at least half.
Streamlining our Content Production team and processes to wipe out all backlogs and reducing our cost of content production per option by 40%.
Evolving our standard operating procedures that define our process flows, roles and responsibilities between our brands and E-commerce teams, led to smoother day-to-day functioning across Merchandizing, Marketing, Content Production and Operations and a better overall experience for our customers.
Decentralizing our fulfillment operations gave us greater scale on inventory and depth and essentially made us more efficient.

These are just the key highlights. We’ve done so much more.

This healthy pace of innovation allowed us to exponentially grow our web sales, traffic and customer base. In year 2, we grew by 208% YoY. Year 3 ends in 3 months and we’re already over 305% Like-for-Like. Our conversion rate and number of repeat customers have both steadily increased month-on-month and we believe these metrics better reflect the increasing maturity of our site and business.

As we continue to improve and refine our Retail E-commerce and Omni-Channel experience, we still have such a long way to go. We don’t believe we’ll ever be finished, because there will always be room for improvement and refinement every year, and think that’s just fine. Every challenge is an opportunity to build and deliver a better customer experience, and seven years on, we’re more primed than ever to keep building, delivering, improving and succeeding.

The Intranet Revolution Era (2010 to present)

Meanwhile, in a world outside the realm of E-commerce, we also took our Group’s Intranet efforts three levels up.

Intranets exist to bring people and teams together so that they can better communicate, collaborate, share and benefit from useful pools of knowledge like forums, people directories, news, announcements, offers, FAQs and so on.

From 2010 to 2015, we designed, developed and evolved a bespoke socially-networked Intranet to do all of this. While it did the job, and our feature set and user experience improved over two versions, we always lacked and yearned for the maturity and feature-richness that social-network leviathan Facebook had.

However, the game changed forever last year when Facebook (finally) announced its enterprise version — Facebook at Work.

After reading the announcement on TechCrunch, I immediately reached out to our partners in Facebook, connected with the Facebook at Work team, and ensured that Landmark was added on the list of the first 300 companies in the world to gain access to it. Today, there are 60,000 companies on a wait list.

On February 15th this year, after six months of piloting it for our brands, territories and corporate divisions, we successfully launched Facebook at Work for 10,000 Landmarkers across 11 countries.

The response has been amazing. It’s been adopted rapidly and we’ve received waves of positive feedback from the employee community. These team members are now connecting, communicating and collaborating in real-time with the same level of dynamism, finesse and convenience that the personal version of Facebook offers.

The Informational Site Redesign Era (2009 to present)

As a precursor to E-commerce, we also re-designed and re-engineered 31 brand sites across our retail and hospitality businesses; sites that have driven millions of sessions in traffic each year and steadily grown year-on-year.

Why did we do this? For a better overall customer experience through better design, better usability, better branding, better content and better technology. That’s a whole lot of betters.

The Citymax Era (2009 to 2015)

We also built digital and E-commerce for Citymax Hotels — our affordable hotels business.

What started as a redesign in 2009 for a better overall user experience graduated to E-commerce by 2010. Over the years, through a series of improvements, two more versions, a mobile responsive site, and localisations in Arabic, Russian and Chinese, web sales grew to drive over 5% of Citymax’s business.

The Great Work, Great Fun Era (2009 to infinity and beyond)

We’ve always been huge on the whole philosophy of “great work, great fun”, and since a picture says a thousand words, here’s a collection of awesome team moments we’ve had as we’ve transformed digital for the Group over the years.

Our Team — Our Greatest Asset Second to None

Our team has been, and will always be, our greatest asset and true engine for success.

In seven years, our Web Team has grown from zero to over 260 in 2 countries. As our team members now hail from over 20 countries, we continue to feel that groovy, multi-cultural United Nations vibe and continue to completely dig it.

It’s been an honor, privilege and complete blast to build, lead, manage and work alongside a team I’m so incredibly proud of. If this is what we’ve accomplished in the last seven years, I can’t wait to see what we do in the next seven. And then some.

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