Known for customizable pieces and its commitment to sustainable craftsmanship, Pandora is synonymous with accessible luxury jewelry. What started as a small shop in Copenhagen has grown into a global powerhouse brand with products sold in more than 100 countries on six continents. That’s a lot of growth and complexity — and it requires a digital strategy that can keep up. When Pandora’s monolithic system started hindering global expansion, engineering teams needed a solution that offered greater efficiency and agility to keep up with the pace of change.
That’s where composable commerce comes in. With a composable architecture, Pandora was able to unify its digital and physical presence, ensure consistency across the entire customer journey, and enable teams to create innovative, immersive experiences for shoppers.
We caught up with Myron Kirk, Pandora’s Director of Engineering for Digital and Retail Technology, to discuss the brand’s new composable architecture, check in on the rollout, and learn more about the journey. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Q: For starters, can you tell us about your digital strategy at Pandora and some of the pillars that govern it?
At Pandora, our digital efforts are at the center of transforming the business. We call this our “Phoenix strategy.” We realize that our digital strategy is key to growth, and it’s all about personalizing the experience for our customers. In fact, digital sales are approaching one third of our business revenue. Currently, we’re in over 35 markets globally, so we have a large distributed footprint. Our online scale is massively important to us.
Pandora is a powerful global brand and the largest jeweler in the world. We need an impactful digital presence — but this means different things in different markets. In some countries, we’re more of an emerging brand, so those sites should be more informational. In other countries, our sites might need to be more transactional —though they might not need the full capabilities around distribution or elements like engraving and loyalty. Then there’s our premium markets, where we want to flex our full capabilities with features like engraving services, click and collect, distribution in country, and loyalty.
Our strategy is very dependent on the country, market, and level of business maturity in that particular region. It’s an iterative, incremental strategy that allows us to grow our capabilities and offer the very best experience for each customer base.
Q: Based on your multi-site, multi-market strategy, can you discuss Pandora’s decision to implement composable architecture and your journey with it so far?
Ultimately, the decision came down to the fact that customer expectations changed in the marketplace. As tech and IT teams worked with our marketing colleagues, we arrived at a new brand strategy as an organization. That new strategy really required a composable architecture to create a more immersive experience. We wanted an app-like feel around the site and a responsive front end. That’s what drove us towards a composable architecture.
Another major factor was the experiences we’ve had in the past with the pace of rollout. Typically, it takes years to roll out more monolithic architectures to so many markets. Since we’re more and more geographically dispersed, that was quite a big deal to us. We also really wanted to optimize ways of working so we could build greater efficiency and agility into our teams.
Q: I don’t think there’s enough information about what day-to-day work looks like as a healthy, functional business with composable architecture. Can you discuss how composable plays into operations at Pandora?
I think it all starts with trying to organize your teams around the architecture, and organize the architecture around your teams. It should be a little bit of both. We have our teams composed around the journey and mapped to specific elements and features. We want to empower teams to look after their respective elements. Each team should have the ability to release independently and get to market really quickly, without lots of downstream dependencies and without having to release other teams’ changes at the same time. That was a key factor for us.
That’s what really creates efficiency. You’re no longer in a place where you have to depend on other people and organize large release events. That aspect of composable commerce was quite a large enabler.
Q: What business outcomes have you achieved since making the switch to composable?
To put it simply: Getting to market quickly. With any platform where you’ve got the front end and the back end integrated and co-joined, it’s gonna take you quite a long time to roll out.
With this composable stack, we worked hard to get the first two markets over the line. But now we’re at the point where we can release a couple of markets every few weeks. Within the space of three to four months, we’ll have global coverage of our new architecture and our new brand concept across all of our markets. That’s a testament to a lot of the architectural decisions we made from the get-go. And frankly, they were hard decisions to make because it was quite a seismic change early in the development process.
Initially, it takes some thought and it takes some time. But then it pays dividends further down the road when you can get to market much faster. We were able to build a very solid foundation.
Q: How do you balance the stability and flexibility of a composable architecture? What advice would you give to engineering leaders planning a rollout?
The partnership we have with Salesforce really helped us define the front end. We decided what we could do ourselves versus what Salesforce could do for us, and agreed on the foundational aspects of this in terms of the front end.
We also agreed on a set of principles. For example, we prioritized high levels of observability. With a composable architecture, there’s a lot of moving parts. On one hand, this means more flexibility, but it can also mean unreliability if not executed correctly and with precision. That’s why we made sure that observability was embedded into our stack.
APIs were also key. We have a new reliance on backend APIs, and there are a lot of moving parts. So it’s critical to understand how they’re performing at all times. On the front end, we also have core web vitals that need to be top notch.
To give an example: Take an area like product listing pages. These are dependent on complex search APIs. To manage all the complexity, we did a lot of piloting on non-transactional sites with less customers. This allowed us to better understand how APIs would behave on PLPs so we could optimize them before rolling them out on a wider scale.
We embedded observability around them so we can continually benchmark and monitor against the numbers in our objectives and key results (OKRs). Our team is always looking for our APIs to be less than 200 milliseconds, which is also in our contracts with our partners. This transparency and observability ensures that everyone’s aligned when it comes to performance standards, all the way through the stack.
Through this journey, it has been immensely important to test performance in low impact, low risk areas. It was also critical to take the time to research the best ways to do phased, gradual rollouts. We didn’t want to just switch on 100% in each market. A phased rollout allows us to gradually ramp up traffic — and we know we can always roll back if we need to.
That’s the joy of a truly flexible architecture. It’s faster, but we’ve still got controls in place to notch up and down as we’re rolling out. And that’s how we manage that process as we’re moving through the regions.
Q: What key pillars do you look for in technology to create a cohesive customer experience? What types of bespoke experiences have you been able to create with composable?
You need to start with the basics. At the core, that means an accurate, real-time view of inventory across all your channels. If you’re a multi-site, multi-market business, there is just so much opportunity for gaps. You need to build the right foundation to make sure there are no inconsistencies.
So that’s the bedrock: Inventory and pricing that join up in cohesion across all your channels. Once you have that bedrock, you can build great customer experiences.
For Pandora, one of these uniquely cool experiences is Studio, where shoppers can design their own jewelry. Whether a customer wants to design their jewelry online or in-store, we offer the same capability and experience on any channel. I think for me, that’s where it starts. It’s building on top of your bedrock with sophisticated scenarios that add value and meaning to the customer experience.
Q: With composable in place, where do you see opportunities for AI to accelerate your business in the future?
Executing AI at speed and with a high level of trust is critical, so it’s important to have use cases that are really well-defined in order to build guardrails. It’s more than setting up a prompt about what AI can do — we also want to define what not to do. Once we get that set up and scaled with a high level of trust, we can continue to open the aperture for what AI and digital labor can do.
Right now, I think we’re learning as an industry about how to really utilize AI and leverage it to improve the customer experience in novel ways. Eventually, AI will be used to create a much more immersive shopping experience than going to a website and clicking through catalogs. Don’t get me wrong: We can make catalogs rich and immersive, but they’re still just catalogs, right? AI has the potential to really change the experience as we know it.
I think it’s a moving target; AI is going to keep evolving. I know everybody has their predictions, but I won’t make any just yet. I’ll leave that to the others right now.
Listen to the full interview for more details about Pandora’s journey
Learn how the brand launched composable architecture globally.
