Migrating fragmented retail sites onto one platform

Global Retail Brands (GRB), an Australian homeware and kitchenware retailer with more than 250 physical stores, operates flagship brands including House, MyHouse, House Bed & Bath, Baccarat, and Robins Kitchen. Before moving to Vercel, the company's web infrastructure was split across multiple platforms: bespoke local systems for House and Robins Kitchen, and a Shopify Plus storefront for MyHouse. That fragmentation created maintenance challenges during high-traffic promotions, siloed the IT team by forcing different skill sets per platform, and slowed every site change because each update had to be adapted for each system.

Looking for a unified, scalable foundation, GRB worked with solution partner Convert Digital to migrate to Vercel. The decision was driven by Vercel's managed infrastructure and uptime guarantees, the flexibility of Next.js for building a dynamic frontend, and security and PCI compliance for handling sensitive customer data. AWS Amplify was evaluated as an alternative, but Vercel's strengths in uptime, scalability, security, and modern tooling won out.

From months-long releases to weekly deploys

The migration had rapid, measurable effects. Site uptime climbed to nearly 100 percent. New feature development, which previously took months, now ships in as little as a week—a more than 75 percent reduction in development time. Deployment times dropped from one hour to under ten minutes. The three key GRB websites were moved incrementally, one at a time, within a six-month window, with each site seeing improved page load speeds and the scalability to handle traffic spikes.

“Using Vercel has made deploying the Global Retail Brands codebase incredibly straightforward for the development team. The Preview Deployments and fast build times are extremely beneficial when it comes to building and testing new features.”

Dan Webb, Technical Lead at Convert Digital

“Thanks to Vercel, GRB's site uptime is nearly 100%. Our feature development time went from months to a week and can deploy in under 10 minutes. Vercel is a total game-changer.”

Romeo Cota, Senior eCommerce Project Manager at GRB

With Prismic as the CMS, GRB relies on several Vercel capabilities: Domain Hosting for streamlined domain management and consistent accessibility, the Developer Experience Platform for faster website updates and better team collaboration, and Speed Insights for real-time performance monitoring to support UX and SEO. Preview Deployments also became part of the workflow, letting the team test updates in a controlled environment before going live and reducing the risk of post-deployment issues.

Next on the roadmap

GRB is now extending its online presence and user engagement, with a loyalty program planned for 2024 aimed at customer retention and sales growth. The company sees the Vercel partnership as a strategic investment supporting its expansion plans and positioning it to remain competitive in Australia's homeware and kitchenware market.