As the leading global platform for the luxury fashion industry, FARFETCH connects shoppers in over 190 countries with more than 1,400 of the world’s best-known brands, boutiques and department stores. Committed to delivering unique shopping experiences and access to the most extensive selection of luxury on a global platform, the company is relying on Microsoft technology to support its growth ambitions. Born in the cloud, FARFETCH has spent the past decade leveraging the scalability and flexibility benefits of Microsoft Azure to build its global marketplace – and then expand it using an ever-growing range of Microsoft tools including Dynamics 365 and AI. Ultimately building a huge ecosystem of innovative, sustainable and efficient solutions to reach even more customers around the world.
“The speed of change that we were seeing in retail five, ten years ago is no longer sustainable. You either adapt really, really, fast to consumer trends, or you risk becoming obsolete.”
Helder Dias Ribeiro, Chief Product Officer at FARFETCH, is describing digital transformation at his company and in the wider retail sector – and the extraordinary partnership that’s allowing them to thrive in it.
“At FARFETCH, we have a vision,” says Dias Ribeiro. “To be the leading platform for the luxury industry and create a global digital stage for all its players. And to do that by way of innovation.”
But that’s far from easy, even for a company the size of FARFETCH. “We have a huge number of control centers, dashboards and operations all around the world that we need to be constantly on top of,” he says. “All of that is fundamentally underpinned by having the right technology and the right technological partner supporting us.
“And for us at FARFETCH, that partner is undoubtedly Microsoft.”
Starting out with a cloud migration and later expanding to security, ERP and AI features, FARFETCH and Microsoft’s collaboration has spanned nearly a decade, helping the company to lay the very foundation for its every present and future ambition. And ultimately establish FARFETCH as a leader in the luxury e-commerce space.
“The last three years have been a merry-go-round, non-stop whirlwind of fast changes, quick responses, and new demands like agility to react, test, pilot, and scale to a global level,” says Dias Ribeiro.
“That’s the great thing about our work with Microsoft: whatever challenges or demands the world has for us, we know that we have a digital backbone allowing us to face them all – and succeed.”
Embedding transformation in the company culture
FARFETCH is an e-commerce platform specialized in luxury fashion products. With a catalog of more 17 million stock units (as of Q1 2023), and a customer base of approximately four million customers, it offers the broadest range of products in the world to a global audience, connecting luxury fashion, creators, curators and consumers.
“FARFETCH is one of those companies where growth, progress and innovation are always high on the agenda,” says Luis Carvalho, Senior Vice President of Technology at FARFETCH. “For as long as we’ve existed, our trajectory has been one of hyper growth – focused on adding new geographies and products, but also attracting new consumers, service lines, and tenants.”
This, he says, is reflected in a working culture that he has experienced firsthand for the past decade.
“Myself and Helder have been with FARFETCH for a number of years,” he explains, adding that his journey has been tied to Microsoft since its very beginnings.
“I joined this company just around the time when we decided to move to Microsoft Azure,” he says. “We’re a company born in the cloud, though initially that was an entirely different setting. We started by running all our software on a rented space. We managed everything ourselves.”
But that quickly proved to be too tiring, complicated and resource intensive for FARFETCH and its ambitions.
“We wanted to expand into more data centers,” he says. “We wanted to have a more global presence, and focus on building our own technology, our own products and services – and lean into experts to offload that effort from us.
“That's when our Azure adventure started.”
Decades on Azure to support growth
Years since the Azure migration, FARFETCH is now thriving in a cloud environment that’s both supporting their vision and empowering them to innovate.
“What we’ve always appreciated about Microsoft and its solutions is their dynamicity and proneness to evolve, which is very much in line with our own mindset of constant growth and evolution,” says Helder Dias Ribeiro.
"That’s essentially what Azure has been giving us: flexibility and agility to move fast, to evolve, but also focus on what’s key for our business – and leveraging all the technology and expertise from Microsoft to accelerate progress.”
The success of the collaboration has been such that FARFETCH has since decided to move beyond Azure, and expand its architecture with new security features.
“Being on the cloud means having access to compliance and security features by design,” says Luis Carvalho. “For us, that has opened up a new discourse to be had internally on what more we could do from this point of view.
“That’s led us to tools like Azure Sentinel, which is allowing us to analyze our own usage and services and bring immense value to our operations.”
This is further reinforced by the addition of Azure Kubernetes Services, which Carvalho says has had a transformational role in terms of productivity.
"We’ve seen many teams' productivity increase anywhere from 10% to 50% in some cases,” he says. "All thanks to the velocity of reaction and the ability to have more access to the configurations.”
The next stage in digital development: Dynamics 365
FARFETCH has not stopped a moment since its journey on Azure began – and is now enjoying a range of new opportunities on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and its various tools.
“Going into Dynamics 365 was the natural next step of our growth ambition,” explains Dias Ribeiro. “We've become an increasingly complex business throughout the years – bringing in new players into our ecosystem and therefore adding new layers to our offering.”
As things currently stand, the FARFETCH Marketplace is now present in 190 countries and territories with items from more than 50 countries and over 1,400 brands, boutiques and department stores – all on one single platform.
“We’ve become a third-party marketplace, bringing together manufacturers, distributors, designers and so on – both digitally and physically,” he continues. “So, we now have stores, POSs, warehouses, and therefore need global supply chain management, advanced analytical and AI capabilities and tighter control on purchases, budgets and more.
“We know that all these new additions will bring us massive advantages and synergies, so we absolutely need to make sure that various systems talk to each other, and we can centralize resources and teams that are going to actually support multiple companies in the group.
“That’s in a nutshell what the D365 family is giving us.”
More precisely, FARFETCH is using the additional flexibility and scalability provided by Dynamics to help other brands move to the cloud too.
“Over the years we’ve been increasingly focusing on bringing new organizations into our ecosystem, and helping them to improve their platform using the knowledge and expertise we gained from our experience with Microsoft,” he explains. “Since we’ve started using Dynamics 365, this process has become faster and faster at each project.
“Compared to the first one we oversaw a few years ago, the most recent one has taken us about 35% of the time to realize.”
Building the marketplace of the future, layer by layer
As they look ahead to their next venture, Carvalho and Dias Ribeiro have no doubt about where FARFETCH is heading: towards more and more digital integration.
“We are now looking at tools within AI and machine learning and using them to deliver all sorts of innovation – from personalization initiatives to more security initiatives and beyond.”
There will also be more and more space for sustainable initiatives, which FARFETCH is already undertaking in collaboration with Microsoft. “We have a platform that is focused primarily on resale and sustainability,” says Dias Ribeiro. “It runs on Microsoft technology, which we use to provide our consumers with ratings on how sustainable the brands that we sell on the platform are.”
But whatever the next step is, the pair guarantees that Microsoft will be there to help them achieve it.
“More than the individual solutions, what Microsoft has given us over the years is an almost symbiotic relationship,” concludes Carvalho. “In the last decade, the underlying fundamentals in the technology that supports our platform have changed multiple times, forcing us to evolve alongside it.
“But every time, we’ve been able to count on Microsoft. Not only have they helped us to stay on top of these technology evolutions, but they’ve also allowed us to always lead the way in innovation – providing us with the technological bedrock to all we want to achieve.”
“The great thing about our work with Microsoft is that whatever challenges or demands the world has for us, we know that we have a digital backbone allowing us to face them all – and succeed.”
Helder Dias Ribeiro, Chief Product Officer, FARFETCH
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