Centric Brands' Journey with Buy with Prime

Centric Brands Overview

• Centric Brands is a global lifestyle brand collective that is a leader in product design, development, sourcing, retail, and digital commerce.
• They have an impressive portfolio of over 100 licensed and owned brands, including Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Joe's Jeans, Under Armour, Disney, and Coach.
• Centric Brands is a $2 billion company with over 2,000 employees and a strong presence in both wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels.

ISAD Brand Transformation

• ISAD is one of Centric Brands' key brands, known for outfitting America for over 80 years.
• Centric Brands acquired the ISAD license in 2021 and set out to reimagine the brand with a new cutting-edge e-commerce website.
• The initial launch of the website was challenging due to 3PL capacity constraints and the global supply chain crisis.

Adopting Buy with Prime

• Centric Brands chose to implement Buy with Prime to address the challenges they faced with their ISAD e-commerce site.
• Key reasons for choosing Buy with Prime:
  • Speed to market: The project had to be live by June to capture Father's Day sales.
  • Fulfillment capacity: Amazon's powerful fulfillment network provided the scale needed to serve customers.
  • Seamless integration: Native integration with Centric's e-commerce platform made it an easy choice.
  • Prime benefits: Offering fast, free, and reliable shipping was crucial for the brand.
  • Product reviews: Leveraging Amazon's extensive product reviews.
  • Frictionless checkout: Using Amazon Pay and the trusted Amazon checkout experience.
  • Analytics and reconciliation: Automating financial reconciliation with downstream systems.

Implementing the Buy with Prime Solution

• Centric Brands worked closely with the Amazon team to design and develop a sustainable solution using AWS.
• The key challenge was integrating the decoupled services of Buy with Prime, Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment, and Amazon Pay to provide a unified data view for Centric Brands.
• The solution involved an extract-transform-load (ETL) process to consolidate data from the different services and automate the reporting and financial reconciliation.

Architecture and Implementation

• The ETL process was built using AWS services:
  • Extract: AWS Lambda functions retrieved data from the various APIs and stored it in Amazon S3.
  • Transform: AWS Glue was used to clean, join, and transform the data.
  • Load: AWS Lambda triggered the loading of the transformed data into Centric Brands' downstream systems.
• Terraform was used to manage the infrastructure as code, enabling easy deployment and scaling across environments.

Outcomes and Future Plans

• Centric Brands successfully launched the revamped ISAD.com site with Buy with Prime integration in June 2022, achieving their target timeline.
• The partnership with Amazon has continued to strengthen, with Centric Brands launching new programs like Amazon Luxury Stores and exploring further cloud migrations to AWS.
• Centric Brands is considering onboarding other brands to the Buy with Prime platform and continues to iterate on customer experiences and analytics capabilities.