Owndays Front-End Redevelopment
Owndays is a Tokyo-based company founded in 1989, offering a wide selection of over 10,000 sunglasses, frames, and eyeglasses. Their products are available in more than 100 retail stores worldwide. The company was later acquired by Lenskart, a multinational optical prescription eyewear retail chain with over 2,000 retail stores.
After Lenskart acquired Owndays, they wanted to transform the website to a newer version with a brand new design and updated technologies, as it had a lot of legacy code and outdated solutions.
Having assigned a team of 4 backend developers, frontend and backend tech leads, testers, and a designer, the company was looking for 2 experienced React developers who could quickly join their team. They underlined the importance of developers being self-driven and result-oriented persons.
Here are some key requirements they had:
This is our forte; JavaScript technologies are our specialty. As a result, two of our developers excelled in the interviews and tests, seamlessly integrating into Lenskart’s team within a matter of days. Owndays management particularly emphasized the significance of rapid onboarding and robust development, given the tight deadlines set by stakeholders.
Front-end Technologies:
Back-end Technologies:
The project is usingscrum methodology, aimed to provide a transparent and flexible development process. Scrum emphasizes iterative and incremental development. It breaks the project into small, manageable parts, with each sprint resulting in a potentially shippable product increment.
It is based on empirical control, meaning that decisions are made based on the current state of the project rather than predictions. This allows for continuous improvement. The development team is encouraged to be self-organizing, taking ownership of how they work and make decisions.
Our front-end department consisted of a tech lead and designer, provided by the client, and two of our React developers. For project management we used Jira.
The key components of our approach included:
Everything you see on the website was developed fully or mainly by Lengin devs. The old version we had to redevelop had an old, not user-friendly UX/UI and legacy front end, which caused poor performance (affected SEO) and a bad user experience that kept from getting more sales.
As the new company owner, they wanted to implement a modern design, making users comfortable to navigate and make purchases. We used React to build the entire front end with the help of Redux for sprint management and Redux Saga for asynchronous actions.
The store features a fairly standard implementation of the catalog and product card. The design is clean and lacks unnecessary details. The catalog incorporates a filter for swift product navigation and displays the available colors for each model.
On the product item page for glasses, you can virtually try on the model of your choice using your webcam. Additionally, there’s a 360-degree view of the model. When proceeding with a purchase, you can choose the desired lenses to accompany your selected frame.
Owndays has an account-client system, which makes shopping more convenient.
In addition to common order tracking and wishlist functions, it offers a custom membership program and the ability to upload prescriptions. This is particularly important in some countries where policies require prescriptions for eyeglass purchases.
You can also find the nearest store and book an eye test.
Together with the client’s team, we successfully delivered a brand-new website with improved UX/UI design and an overall performance that is 2.73 times faster than the old version. The client appreciated the proactiveness and ideas our developers brought to the front end, sometimes improving the original design solutions.
Our collaboration has lasted for over half a year and is ongoing. When it comes to challenges and experiences, our front-end developers have gained valuable experience working with a large enterprise-level team and their project management approach. From the technical aspect – working with a microservices-like app infrastructure.
“You provide the most stable and reliable team. The work with you shows a good Return On Investment. Communication is almost real-time and devs are vey adaptive.”
I’ve ended up interviewing some of your people on the UpWork platform. According to testimonials and references, you provide the most stable and reliable team.
It always depends on how you want to see your strategic and operational teams. I’m a big fan of having a small internal team combining a big individual contribution made by freelancers.
By using local talent, you’re basically limiting yourself geographically for absolutely no reason at all.
Corporations and executives see the advantage of the hybrid model and have a tendency to be quite conservative. So it’s really tricky to convince them to recalculate how much better it is to have 20 people working for you across the world than having seven people come to an office.
Hiring those seven people takes away a year, and hiring quality professionals across the world will take two weeks. I think that’s where freelancing and agencies can do a great job.
It’s not one of those products where you can’t expect from the beginning to the end how it was gonna look, so there was a lot of experimentation. But the delivered quality is good as well as the speed. The team is quite reliable.
Also, the price. The work with you shows a good Return On Investment.
It was almost real-time. We work in different time zones, but they are very adaptive. And even when I give them a task, if they have the slightest doubt, they test me in Slack. The communication was really quick and responsive.
Definitely! I would recommend you for other projects we’re trying to build, too.
I can’t estimate you on a scale from 0 to 10 because there are always things that we can improve, of course, but we recommend you for other projects and companies.
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