Christian Dior shortens time to market from 15 minutes to instant updates

Christian Dior, one of the world's most renowned luxury fashion houses, has always been synonymous with elegance, sophistication, and innovation. With a legacy spanning over seven decades, Dior continues to redefine fashion trends and set new standards in the fashion retail industry.

Christian Dior recognizes the pivotal role of technology in enhancing customer experiences. To that end, they were in search of ways to streamline their digital transformation efforts and ensure the seamless deployment of new features across their online platforms.

Before adopting LaunchDarkly, the teams across Christian Dior had a cumbersome workflow reliant on manual pull requests, leading to decreased developer productivity and slower time-to-market. They also needed a way to test features in production and roll them out gradually. This posed significant challenges for the DiorStar mobile app for the Sales Associates in stores, where any unstable changes could impact target pilot stores and revenue. Additionally, Christian Dior could not target specific features based on geographic or user segments.

Christian Dior implemented LaunchDarkly, empowering teams with the autonomy to set up specific environments for testing and releasing software changes quickly. LaunchDarkly enabled granular feature targeting, allowing teams to roll out stable and tested features by store, region, and even by specific sales associates. This targeted approach helped minimize the risk of outages and disruptions to the in-store customer experience, crucial for a significant portion of Dior's revenue.

LaunchDarkly also facilitated feature testing in production safely and provided real-time monitoring capabilities, enabling Christian Dior to gather feedback and iterate rapidly while keeping production environments secure. Integrations with Jira and communication platforms like MSTeams allowed for seamless collaboration among product managers, release managers, and development teams, enhancing visibility and communication throughout the feature release process.

LaunchDarkly yielded significant benefits for Christian Dior:

Accelerated Time-to-Market: By streamlining feature management and enabling targeted rollouts, Christian Dior experienced a dramatic reduction in the time required to release new features, shifting from a process that could take hours to one that now takes minutes.

Enhanced User Experience: With the ability to target features based on geographic location, user segments, and even individual sales associates, Christian Dior improved the relevance and effectiveness of its digital experiences, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement.

Improved Developer Productivity: The LaunchDarkly user-friendly SDK and seamless integration with development workflows empowered developers to focus on delivering value to production confidently, while providing the business with control over feature releases.

Maintained Production Stability: The LaunchDarkly granular feature targeting and real-time monitoring capabilities enabled Christian Dior to innovate and iterate rapidly while minimizing the risk of disruptions to production environments, crucial for a customer-centric retail brand operating in a fast-paced industry.

With the help of LaunchDarkly, Christian Dior achieved its core principles of customer-centricity and faster time-to-market, enabling innovation and iteration while safeguarding production stability in a highly competitive and dynamic market.