Expanding THG Ingenuity’s Commercial Capabilities
SaaS | Fulfilment | Compliance | Product Management2022 - 2024After Cult Beauty was acquired by THG I merged with the UX team where I quickly established myself as a product and commerce platform expert.
My experience delivering large-scale projects at Cult was immediately recognised enabling me to self-manage and co-lead multiple complex product concepts on the Ingenuity roadmap as well as identify and successfully pitch product opportunities of my own.
Key Deliverables
Flexible Commerce Fulfilment
THG Ingenuity is a multi-tenancy commerce platform serving dozens of brands across a wide variety of markets and regions.
Maintaining constant awareness of market trends, consumer behaviour and business goals of the highest-grossing retailers on the platform is critical to developing new USP features that keep Ingenuity competitive in a rapidly changing industry.
Co-ordinating with Relationship and Programme Managers across multiple client accounts, I recognised an opportunity to elevate Ingenuity’s fulfilment offering from a basic platform requirement into a marketable, unique suite of features allowing complete flexibility in how brands can offer and distribute their products to customers.
After successfully pitching my solution designs and product strategy to our CTO and Product Director, I took on the role of a Product Lead once again and led a team of UX Designers and Researchers into delivering a massive library of prototypes demonstrating the capabilities to our major clients.
This project subsequently influenced Ingenuity’s entire fulfilment system and inventory allocation architecture as well as laying the foundation for multiple future projects that solidified high-profile clients decision to use the platform.
Fast-Flowing Roadmap of Basket, Checkout & Payment Capabilities
Alongside major projects, I identified and made significant contributions to the Checkout and Payments enhancement roadmap.
Alongside product demos, I produced and presented the Future of Checkout roadmap at our quarterly Product Planning Week to the SMT and heads of department.
Spanning dozens of improvements and new capabilities, some key enhancements to the ingenuity platform were:
Pay On Delivery for emerging markets
Overhaul of Alternative Payment Method integration, UX and signposting
Combined Gift Card and Loyalty Rewards redemption integrations
Payment card and customer address input, error and saving optimisations
Pay On Delivery alone launched with a predicted first-year value of £20m, with the other shortlisted enhancements highlighted adding a combined £10-15m annually to our top 3 brands.
Identity Verification for Regional Compliance
With Ingenuity supporting so many brands in different regions, ensuring compliance with local selling and data regulations is a constant challenge.
As a stickler for detail and a research machine, I am frequently consulted on compliance problems.
One such compliance requirement was customer age, impacting multiple high-revenue clients in the Nordic regions.
Alongside the Solutions Consultant for this market, I immediately set about identifying the specific restrictions on product advertising and purchasing.
What became quickly obvious was that no single solution would be optimal for all clients in all regions as we would always have to apply the strictest compliance, harming those brands with more lenient regulations.
I rapidly designed a solution of tiered, configurable restrictions as a single bolt-on product that was agnostic to the original requirement of ‘Age’ and could instead be integrated with any 3rd party verification software.
Configurations
Sitewide or By Page
Hard verification prevents users from viewing any content on the domain and instead presents them with a customisable ‘lockout’ page to verify themselves.
Soft verification enables business users to toggle the lockout UI on specific pages rather than domain-wide.
By Product
Hard verification shows restricted product tiles in search results and list pages but with obfuscated data, with a CTA prompting users to verify to unlock the SKUs.
Soft verification where the product is viewable as normal but Add to Bag is disabled and replaced with a CTA prompt to verify.
Content Blocks
Widgets in the page builder can be attributed with a verification boolean that obfuscates the content and prompts users to verify and reveal the block.
At Purchase
Hard verification prevents users with restricted products in the basket from proceeding to checkout.
Soft verification allows the user to complete verification when placing the order. Failure strikes the restricted products from the order and releases held funds, using existing automated ‘out of stock’ fulfilment logic.
This enabled clients across alcohol, tobacco, supplements, gambling, gaming, merchandise and more to efficiently maximise their merchandising strategy according to each region’s regulations and positioned Ingenuity as a highly attractive platform for future clients in these markets.
White Label Gift Cards
Several brands on Ingenuity utilised costly off-site 3rd party gift card providers that converted poorly, and our highest revenue clients had fully bespoke gift cards at the top of their wishlist but could not attach commercial figures to the feature.
Taking ownership of this project I pitched a white label solution in collaboration with our Payments Senior PM who sourced the commercial value for our top 5 brands.
Leveraging a previous solution design I had created that allowed sites to support multiple Product Page Templates, and the work delivered for Flexible Fulfilment, I was able to design a technically efficient, business and user-configurable Gift Card product fully supported on all storefronts for all markets as well as in our OMS and Fraud Engine and managed the UX design and development of the feature to bring the POC to testing.
Worth multiple £10ms annually across our top 10 brands this was a highly rewarding project that leveraged multiple foundations, strategies and considerations I had laid ahead of time in past projects.
