A marketplace that needed rapid expansion
Laced is an authenticated sneaker and fashion marketplace where every item gets verified by their in-house team before it reaches the buyer. By 2023, they'd cleared £100 million in sales and had a hard deadline to expand into Europe.
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. That assumption was now embedded in everything - shipping logic, pricing, product listings, even the way the admin tools worked. A textbook legacy modernisation challenge.
When we arrived for a six-month engagement - part consultancy, part hands-on development - we found the engineering team stretched thin and heading in two directions at once. They were mid-way through rewriting the entire frontend in JavaScript, and simultaneously planning to break the monolith into microservices. Both initiatives were well-intentioned, but neither would have been finished in time, and neither addressed the actual blocker: the platform had no concept of multiple markets, currencies, or languages.
Stopping the wrong work, starting the right work
The first thing we did was halt both rewrites. The JavaScript frontend rewrite was burning months of effort for no user-facing improvement, so we guided Laced's developers to upgrade the existing Rails view components instead. The microservices migration would have fractured the codebase at the worst possible moment, so we kept the monolith and focussed on the domain model underneath.
These were uncomfortable conversations, but they freed up the team to work on what European expansion actually required. We set the technical direction and guided prioritisation across several workstreams, working alongside Laced's developers on a platform that was live and serving real customers throughout.
The purchase system had bugs that caused miscounts in users' account balances, so the team fixed the way it tracked and reconciled transactions. Pricing was hardcoded to sterling, so together we reworked the money handling to support multiple currencies. Shipping logic was tightly coupled to UK carriers and rates, so we helped the team rebuild the routing to find the cheapest paths for packages crossing borders.
Internationalisation came next. Hardcoded English strings were everywhere - not just in views, but in mailers, error messages, and admin screens. Together we added translation support across the full stack. We also guided upgrades to the latest versions of Rails and React, giving the team a stable foundation to build on rather than one they were constantly working around.
European launch, on time
Laced launched their European expansion in summer 2023 - on deadline, on a live platform, without a single day of downtime. Not a UK site with a European skin bolted on, but a genuinely multi-market platform supporting multiple currencies, languages, and shipping territories.
Adding a new market is now a configuration exercise, not an engineering project. The decisions that mattered most in this engagement were the ones that stopped work, not started it. Halting the frontend rewrite and the microservices migration bought the team months of runway that went directly into features customers could actually use.
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