Ambition

Tapestry, Inc. is an American multinational luxury fashion holding company. It is based in New York City and is the parent company of three major brands: Coach New York, Kate Spade New York and Stuart Weitzman. Every year, Tapestry hosts its annual sample sale, offering products at discounted prices to its employees and contractors. This event has been increasingly popular among employees over the years, but recent numbers have shown a consistent decline in sales. Tapestry attributed this decline to technical issues with the Employee Sample Sale Registration System, the application used to register for the event, and poor user experience. Upon further analysis, Tapestry traced the issue back to legacy architecture in the application that limited performance and scalability. Tapestry also discovered it was incurring high licensing and maintenance costs despite only using the system for a limited time each year.

Action

Tapestry initiated a large-scale digital transformation that involved migrating the company’s existing systems to the cloud and completely modernizing the user experience to revitalize this once-popular employee event. The primary goals of this transformation were to reduce the system maintenance costs, enhance the overall security posture and increase sales by returning the event to its former status.

Tapestry partnered with Wipro to help strategize and execute this transformation. Tapestry wanted to use the cloud to leverage the scalability and elasticity of the infrastructure, including microservices (based on demand) to optimize resource utilization and cost efficiency. In alignment with their vision, Wipro proposed an application modernization solution on AWS cloud that uses cloud-native, serverless microservices-based architecture for faster development cycles and easier maintenance, even for complex user interfaces. Switching to the AWS pay-as-you-go pricing model would help reduce administrative overhead and AWS managed services would provide strong, round-the-clock technical support.

Other solution details include: 

  • Redesigned the presentation layer with Angular 9, making it compatible with all devices for a more inclusive user experience
  • Utilizing AWS Native Pipeline for CI/CD and a code repository
  • In the target architecture, Wipro leveraged AWS Lambda API gateway, a serverless service, to reduce operating cost and improve application performance
  • Migrated .net application code to .net core with micro services architecture
  • Cognito enhanced authentication services for mobile users
  • Leveraged AWS WAF to protect against web-based threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks
  • Wipro migrated data to AWS RDS PostgreSQL from Microsoft SQL server to reduce cost and improve security

Ambitions Realized

In moving its Employee Sample Sale Registration System to the cloud, Tapestry included valuable upgrades to ensure the application can meet the changing needs of the business and its employees. By enabling OAuth 2.0, Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure AD and Cognito integration (allows user authentication from different devices, including mobile) Tapestry significantly enhanced its security posture and streamlined the user experience, making it more intuitive. The results were impactful, resulting in nearly two times more registrations. Tapestry embraced managed services to reduce operating costs by approximately 30% and increased the efficiency of these operations by outsourcing them to a qualified team capable of constant monitoring.