Lingerie and specialist adult retailer Ann Summers has completed the transformation of its data integration layer, which it said will streamline, modernise and future-proof its systems.

The company partnered with ecommerce-focused technology provider PMC for the move, which was done to simplify its core IT infrastructure after years of use. Its legacy systems were not only making its tech stack difficult to manage, but slowing innovation, but also overly expensive to maintain, the retailer said.

“We’d gotten to the stage where we were continually building on top of things,” said Jeannette Copeland, technology and supply chain director at Ann Summers. “That gets to the stage where you’re almost building on top of sand […] we got to the point where we needed to dig in and change that.”

“With the most recent push from an AI perspective, unless you've got your data straightened out, it can hold you back. We are trying to ensure we've got foundations within our data so we can scale in the future and that we've got options so we don't find ourselves in a technical corner,” she added.

The project also aimed to increase the Ann Summers website’s discoverability. Due to its sale of adult toys, the retailer’s website is often hidden in traditional searches.

Speaking at the Retail Technology Show in April, Ann Summers chief executive Maria Hollins lamented that it has been designated an adult retailer by Google despite selling many “quite normal” products.

In order to increase visibility, the retailer said it aimed to use this overhaul to create greater discoverability across marketplaces and third-party sellers, such as clothing chain Next.

Over three months, the company replaced its legacy systems with modular architecture, migrating its data layer to partner PMC’s unified commerce platform Graphine. The two companies worked together to reverse-engineer over 100 integrations to create a new modern commerce platform based on composable architecture, Ann Summers said.

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