Brompton Bikes

About Brompton

Made for cities, Brompton bikes are sold in 47 countries around the world and over 70% of production is exported. The company now produces almost 100,000 bikes a year and over 1,000,000 have hit the roads since the first bike was made in 1975 by the inventor Andrew Ritchie. A Brompton bike folds up to a third of its size and is perfect for those that live, work or play in cities.

Brompton is a certified B Corp; a global community of businesses committed to using their business as a force for good.

The challenge: A legacy system with complicated operations

Despite its exponential growth, Brompton began to experience several legacy platform-related issues that limited its growth and new business needs. The company's systems weren’t scalable, and the platform struggled to handle high traffic volumes. 

Poor website performance

At times, the website could only accommodate a few dozen people on a page before it started to collapse. This lack of stability and the slow speed of the website were affecting the overall user experience and brand perception.

“Every time we launched a new product, we saw the site struggle. Sometimes, it would crash, and we'd have to restart and restore it. We had lots of stability issues with the old stack.” 

David Tidy, Digital Product Manager at Brompton

Uncooperative CMS

Additionally, the company's existing Content Management System (CMS) was complex and hard to administer. It was connected to Brompton's legacy systems, making it difficult to scale up and enter new markets. 

Unscalable processes

The business was also constrained by a made-to-order manufacturing and dispatch process that wasn’t scalable. While customers could customize their bicycles by selecting individual parts, Brompton’s dispatch software was tightly integrated with its manufacturing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

This tight coupling made it difficult to adapt and scale operations efficiently. As the company sought to remove the interdependencies between the retail and manufacturing systems, the need for replatforming became even more urgent.

The solution: A headless setup with Alokai, Bloomreach, and BigCommerce

In light of these challenges, Brompton began to search for a solution that could offer stability, speed, efficiency, and usability. They evaluated various platforms, including Salesforce and Shopify, but none seemed to offer the seamless integration they were seeking.

The turning point came when Brompton’s Systems Integrator (SI), Apply Digital (Alokai’s growth partner), suggested Alokai , a Frontend as a Service (FEaaS) solution. As a result, Brompton was able to implement a headless setup with Alokai and leverage Bloomreach's CMS and BigCommerce's ecommerce engine. 

This setup promised a faster, more efficient, and highly scalable system suitable for entering new markets, which aligned closely with Brompton’s future goals. 

“We chose Alokai because of the out-of-the-box library with all of the components and the JavaScript frontend. This helped us save a huge amount of time for development.”

David Tidy, Digital Product Manager at Brompton 

Brompton’s quest to replatform completely

The new solution wasn’t just an integration but an entire replatforming project that would include all of Brompton’s global stores. To help manage the process, the company decided to keep the old website running concurrently and phase out the launches, starting with the US market. 

It operated as an entirely different business, with its own warehouse, payments, and entity, so when everything was ready to go, the old website was shut down, and a new storefront was opened. Learning from this experience and adopting best practices, Singapore, the UK, and finally, the EU stores followed. 

Today, Brompton Bikes operates on 11 active storefronts, launched in the span of 10 months, thanks to the joint effort on the modernization. 

The integrations of Alokai with Bloomreach and BigCommerce were seamless and offered a lightweight, fast, and easy-to-use platform. 

“We replaced the main domain on the website and our ERP-driven dispatching warehousing process with the same systems that we were now using in the US and Singapore. So it wasn't just a website change, it was an entire process of running the business.” 

David Tidy, Digital Product Manager at Brompton

The result: Increased speed, efficiency, and scalability

Lightning speed and performance

With Alokai’s pre-built and highly composable solutions, the company was able to handle 10x the traffic capacity of their previous platform, significantly enhancing the overall website performance. Additionally, there were 6x faster content creation and a 5x faster end-to-end consumer journey.

“We've made it even faster since by deploying a content delivery network (CDN) and some caching onto the site. So, it's probably near a 6 to 7 times faster than it was before. Customers can now navigate the website in seconds!”

David Tidy, Digital Product Manager at Brompton. 

Improved customer experience & personalization

The reduced bounce rates and improved conversion rates are testaments to the improved customer experience. This change has allowed Brompton to focus on enhancing their product offerings and user experience rather than on managing technical issues.

Moreover, having multiple subdomains with the same ecommerce engine could now give Brompton the opportunity to customize website content to fit the unique needs of an individual market. This significantly improved customer targeting, making sure that the right content reaches the right audience.

The future: Expansion to new markets

As Brompton looks ahead, they plan to bring existing subscription services onto the website. The company plans to make their site more relevant to each market by customizing the user journey based on user data and market needs. 

“Alokai just works extremely well. We don't really have to think about anything unless we want to create a new component for the frontend. We have very little need to actually do anything with your storefront, which I think is a testament to how well it works and how well it's been integrated.”

David Tidy, Digital Product Manager at Brompton. 

Brompton's partnership with Alokai has set the stage for a new chapter in the company's growth story. The seamless integration, improved website performance, and potential for future expansion are clear indicators that Brompton is well on its way to achieving its long-term goals.