A marketplace that needed rapid expansion
Laced is an authenticated sneaker and fashion marketplace - every item gets verified by their in-house team before it reaches the buyer. By 2023, they'd cleared £100 million in sales and expanded well beyond sneakers.
We'd built the original platform back in 2018. It did the job well, but the architecture assumed a single market: UK buyers, UK sellers, one currency, one language. When Laced decided to expand into Europe, that assumption was embedded in everything. After five years of fast growth, the original architecture had become a constraint — a textbook legacy modernisation challenge. Shipping logic, pricing, product listings, even the way the admin tools worked. You couldn't just add a French version - the whole system needed upgrading.
Reworking the foundations without stopping the business
The temptation with a project like this is to do a "big bang" update. But Laced had a live marketplace doing serious volume - we couldn't disappear for six months.
So we worked through it piece by piece, upgrading the Rails application and restructuring without taking anything offline.
Shipping came first. The existing logic was tightly coupled to UK-specific assumptions - carriers, rates, the lot. We helped Laced’s team rebuild it to be market-aware, so each territory could have its own shipping configuration without duplicating the underlying fulfilment logic.
Next there was internationalisation. Hardcoded English strings were everywhere - not just in the views, but in mailers, error messages, admin screens. Extracting all of that is the kind of work that sounds simple until you're actually doing it.
The biggest structural change was separating marketplaces by country. The original platform had no concept of "markets" - everything just was. We had to introduce that abstraction across the entire stack, so that products, pricing, listings, and availability could be controlled independently per territory.
Getting this right was the difference between a platform that could grow into new markets and one that would need re-engineering every time Laced expanded somewhere new.
What changed
Laced launched their European expansion in summer 2023 and now ships globally. Not a UK site with a European skin bolted on - a genuinely multi-market platform.
Adding a new territory is a configuration exercise now, not an engineering project. Which is exactly the kind of thing that only matters once you actually need to do it a second time.
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