Embedding a senior product engineering team inside a global fashion group

The client is one of the world's largest fashion groups. Its technology organisation builds and operates digital products at international scale, supported by a distributed engineering ecosystem with strict standards for architecture, infrastructure and deployment.

Its resale platform extends the circularity proposition of one of the group's principal brands into the second-hand market. The product has to manage a large and constantly changing catalogue while connecting buyers and sellers across different European countries.

The group needed to increase the pace and quality of development across the resale platform. Its existing delivery setup was not producing the results expected, and the requirement extended beyond a temporary increase in capacity.

The client needed a stable senior team capable of taking responsibility for critical product initiatives and working as part of its engineering organisation. That meant adapting to the group's hexagonal architecture, Java and Spring Boot services, AWS infrastructure, proprietary CI/CD tooling and internal quality standards.

For an external team, the challenge was as organisational as it was technical: contribute quickly without lowering the standards or disrupting the product already in operation.

In spring 2025, Tailor assembled a team of four senior backend engineers, including a technical lead, and embedded them within the client's technology organisation.

The team works inside the group’s existing systems, tools and delivery processes. It takes ownership of ongoing product work and contributes to decisions affecting core services within the resale platform.

That continuity has allowed the team to move from increasing delivery capacity to leading initiatives with significant architectural and operational risk.

At the centre of the work is the Product Micro, a product engine that manages every item on the resale platform. The service operates inside the group's wider ecosystem, alongside its event bus, search infrastructure and API gateway.

One of the team's main initiatives was the unification of three previously isolated European markets into a single euro-zone marketplace. Keeping each country separate limited the supply available to its buyers and made smaller markets harder to scale.

The migration covered users, products, lots, categories, orders, notifications, carts and payment configurations. To reduce cutover risk, the team implemented a shadow mode that kept products available in the legacy and unified markets while the new architecture was validated.

The unified catalogue approached 200,000 products, making manual classification increasingly difficult to sustain.

The team added an asynchronous AI tagging workflow to the moderation process. Once a moderator approves a product, an AI service returns structured tags and assigns them automatically, helping keep the catalogue consistent and searchable as it grows.

The team has also developed agentic workflows for software delivery and helped introduce those practices within the client's wider engineering organisation. Tailor's backend lead was appointed as an internal AI Champion, a role normally held by members of the company's own teams.

The engagement gave the client a stable senior backend team supporting continuous, critical product work across the resale platform.

The team unified three European markets into one, creating a marketplace with approximately five times the catalogue scale of each legacy market. Close to 200,000 products were brought into the new product and AI-tagging architecture.

The appointment of Tailor's technical lead as an internal AI Champion also reflects the team's influence beyond its immediate backlog: an external engineering partner contributing to how a large European technology organisation adopts agentic development practices.