Podcast: Jimmy Brings massively decreases time to market with a composable approach

Introduction

For Jimmy Brings, Australia’s first on demand alcohol delivery service, it all started in a little suburb named Bondi, Sydney. The two founders were running around every evening to deliver alcohol to their customers. They kept growing and growing and people started to love the concept of delivering cold alcohol in just 30 minutes to their door. At that time this concept truly was groundbreaking as no such thing as on demand delivery existed. 

Now, Jimmy Brings is an Australia wide business, representing every major capital city and most regional cities as well. 

Jimmy Brings’ platform started to hit its limitations and they decided to go for a composable commerce stack. Adam Watt, Head of Engineering at Jimmy Brings, talks about this with Jamie and Marvin from Deity in The Commerce Composers Podcast. In this blog we cover the highlights of Jimmy Brings’ new and fully composable digital experience built on Deity so keep on reading! 

The Project

This is a huge project with a lot of moving parts. The first thing to do was to get a really good grasp of the business: what does the playing field and the different business processes look like? Jimmy Brings is an alcohol delivery service and on demand delivery is quite different from regular ecommerce. It all starts with the location of the customers and from there Jimmy Brings has to decide what products they want to show, what prices, what promotions they want to apply and so on. 

When we had this clear, Jimmy Brings had to decide what they wanted to change, what third-party services they wanted to use and what the requirements were. They didn’t have to worry about the connections, orchestration and everything working well together because Deity’s Composable Commerce platform makes sure of this. That’s how we got off to a good start. 

This is what Jimmy Brings needed. You can’t just have BigCommerce isolated and not make sure that it works with for example your internal ERP system. Or you can’t have Algolia running in isolation without it being aware of stock availability or such things. That is why we started to make sure we understand these business processes.

Marvin van Wingerde, Head of Product at Deity

The Launch!

We can most definitely say that the Deity x Jimmy Brings project was huge. Together we managed to launch the completely new, composable platform in just 8 months time, which is an incredible achievement. 

The three weeks before the launch were all about making sure that everything works as intended so when the actual moment was there it was great to see that the launch was successful and everything went smoothly. 

‘’The launch was a fantastic moment to be honest. Something I always remember is that first transaction on the new ecom platform. Transferring over 400,000 customers in one night and having a really solid day of trade the next day was an amazing experience.’’ - Adam Watt, Head of Engineering at Jimmy Brings 

The Results

With the composing layer Jimmy Brings can now bring new features to market quickly and adapt to the ever changing customer demand. They’re not dependent on a commerce engine anymore and they can easily tweak in the middleware layer which gives a huge advantage compared to building separate integrations or building everything inside a commerce engine. When Jimmy Brings wants to add or replace specific features or services, they don’t have to start building everything again or rebuild the dependency in the frontend. They can just add or remove specific components and optimize their stack. That’s the benefit of integrating via Deity’s composer instead of building direct system to system integrations. This makes Jimmy Brings’ tech stack maintainable and highly future-proof. 

Fast time to market is something that’s very important for Jimmy Brings and with this new Composable Architecture they can focus on building and launching new features for their customers rather than simply patching the holes. 

For me this has probably been the quietest summer that I've had in terms of tech, so that's a fantastic thing. Obviously, weekends are a great time for trade in Australia for alcohol delivery services. The last couple of years, with Jimmy brings, we've had to have meetings about, do we need to buy more servers for the platform? Who's going to be on call to scale in the service? And so on. So, when peak season rolled around this year, it was amazing to see that everything was relaxed, nice and smooth. Thanks to the Composable approach.

Adam Watt, Head of Engineering at Jimmy Brings

A True Composable Commerce Story

With Deity as their foundation, Jimmy Brings was able to build a complete composable digital experience platform, across all devices. They could pick the right tools to map their business processes 100% to what their customer needed, while Deity provides them with connections and orchestration between all services.

Jimmy Brings uses Deity as the core composer and PWA storefront to deliver a unified web and native app experience. The app, based on the same codebase, is available on the web as a PWA, and on both the Google and iOS Store as a native app. That’s what true Composable Commerce is all about!

Are you also looking for an endlessly flexible ecommerce setup that massively accelerates your growth and time to market? Let’s get in touch and build the future of ecommerce, together.