Old Software, New Tricks - Seamlessly
Modern order fulfillment meets legacy e-commerce solution.
Executive Summary
Fabric Boutique is a speciality fabric store based in Woodburn, OR. Over the last ten years they’ve earned a reputation for sourcing high quality fabrics, clothing, and accessories. In addition to staples like scarves and shirts, Fabric Boutique offers traditional sashmyras, bridal lace, wedding party sets, and custom embroidery services.
Fabric Boutique approached Steelhead Software to support their legacy e-commerce & order management application. Their ideal partner was someone with the skills and experience to support their existing tech stack who also had the foresight to build on top of their platform.
Steelhead not only maintained their aging software, but also extended their custom order fulfillment application. Fabric Boutique was able to maintain their investment and scale their existing technology without replacing it completely.
Technology
- Javascript / HTML / CSS
- Bootstrap 4
- ASP.NET 4.7
- Entity Framework 6
- MSSQL Server
- SmarterASP.net hosting platform
The Steelhead team inherited Fabric Boutique’s e-commerce platform from a long retired software vendor. Despite the project tech stack showing its age, Steelhead was able to continuously deliver value and reduce tech debt.
The team advised Fabric Boutique on which dependencies were the highest risk of becoming obsolete and formed a plan to migrate to more up-to-date technologies without requiring a full rebuild. By doing an immediate technical risk analysis at the beginning of the relationship, Steelhead was able to mitigate the highest priority risks to Fabric Boutique’s platform.
Challenges
Already a household name in the mid-Willamette Valley, Fabric Boutique was ready into expand to greater markets. But there were two problems:
- The platform was built using an aging tech stack and hadn’t been well maintained. Few software shops knew how to support it, and even fewer were interested in taking on the work
- The existing web application worked well as an e-commerce platform but lacked key fulfillment functionality for employees.
Pre-orders were coming in via email and were messy to track. Partial fulfillment of digital orders was especially challenging. It wasn’t scalable, and their most lucrative services were leaving money on the table.
“Steelhead did a fantastic job of building on top of our existing application and supporting us along the way.” - Marie Boianoff, Co-Owner
Outcomes
Despite working with a legacy tech stack that few people in today’s market understand, Steelhead and Fabric Boutique joined forces to build a robust order management & fulfillment system on top of their existing e-commerce solution.
The new workflow allowed users to manage and partially fulfill incoming e-commerce orders.
Using their new toolset, Fabric Boutique leverages their custom embroidery offering with a fully guided workflow for customers to select custom embroidery options. These options are carried through to the backend where they are fulfilled by the embroidery team.
The new fulfillment app also supports product bundles, enabling Fabric Boutique to easily sell & ship wedding sets on their existing e-commerce application.
What’s next?
Fabric Boutique has their sights set on a new marketing website, with eventual goals of replacing their legacy e-commerce solution altogether.