Abercrombie & Fitch Co. embraces Azure infrastructure to better serve customers

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (A&F Co.), a global retailer with more than 750 stores around the world, found itself at a technology crossroad. The company knew that to continually transform the customer shopping experience, it needed to move from its traditional tech infrastructure and modernize its data estate to the cloud. This strategic decision across its family of brands, including Abercrombie, abercrombie kids, YPB, Hollister, and Gilly Hicks, was rooted in purpose: To be there for its customers on their journey of being and becoming who they are. By migrating its tech platform to the cloud, A&F Co. could offer customers more immediate and personalized omnichannel experiences, while enabling its developers to quickly adopt future AI innovations.

Prior to its cloud first strategy, A&F Co. managed hundreds of on-premises applications across thousands of servers—disparate systems that required its engineers to focus on time-intensive infrastructure maintenance rather than the expansion of customer innovation strategies and more personalized digital journeys.

“Retail is incredibly complex, with different large app ecosystems needing to integrate seamlessly and be performant, especially during peak retail seasons,” says Jay Summerlot, Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at A&F Co. “To meet our current and future digital transformation goals, we needed a platform where all our modern integrations and data lakes could coexist together and serve as a backbone—a platform that could help us more quickly and effortlessly meet customer needs.”

Modernizing a global infrastructure

A&F Co. reviewed its vendor options for migrating two different workloads, its on-premises e-commerce environment and its data estate. It chose Microsoft Azure to create its Global Data Cloud platform—a trusted, scalable environment to modernize its platforms. The A&F Co. cloud infrastructure now hosts all its global e-commerce sites, modern data platform, and modern integration platform.

“Azure was the best fit, offering robust data quality solutions,” says Nicole Nelson, Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics at A&F Co. “The fact that Microsoft is so open to innovation—including support for open-source models and generative AI—was key.” Other factors important to Nelson includedthe ability for the Azure platform to handle its massive data volume and keep it in compliance with regulatory demands.

"We modernized our integration platforms by implementing a new API platform on Azure,” adds Lauren Morr, Senior Vice President, Digital Engineering at A&F Co. “Previously, eight people handled integrations company-wide. Now, with new templates and accelerators, over 120 developers use these platforms, significantly speeding up development and time to market."

“Our catalyst for moving to Azure was really to keep up with explosive e-commerce growth,” adds Morr. “We wanted to be closer to our customers and more responsive to their needs wherever they are in the world.”

Speed and scalability—in time for the holidays

One of A&F Co.’s biggest challenges was ensuring all its applications, including those not originally cloud-native, performed well in the cloud. As a result, it dedicated significant time upfront to study and conduct performance testing. A&F Co.’s next goal was to migrate a major application to the cloud before the holiday season.

It began by developing infrastructure as code to ensure the process could be repeated globally. Then the company launched its first go-live in the Europe andSoutheast Asia regions, with a fallback to on-premises if needed, which ultimately wasn’t necessary.

This success led A&F Co. to move all its North American e-commerce sites to the cloud for the next holiday season, completing the process in half the time and with zero downtime.“Hardware had always been our limiting factor in effectively scaling our businesses and brands,” says Morr. “What truly happened in moving to the cloud is that we experienced our best holiday season ever.”

Transformational data and analytics reporting

Today, the company’s entire digital storefront and modern data lakes all run on Azure, greatly improving the customer omnichannel experience. The A&F Co. tech stack has three main components that all sit on top of Azure and use a medallion architecture, a three-layerdata design pattern used to logically organize data in a lake house. First, Microsoft Power BI is the engine that spreads intelligence across the organization; Snowflake serves as the reporting layer where it builds and aggregates everything it needs for performance; and Databricks serves as the AI and machine learning engine for Abercrombie data science teams to build models. The team uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for application migration and deployment.

The company’s stack now serves real-time insights from its data lake to the company’s data science platform teams, creating faster executive-level visibility and decision making around elevating the customer experience. “Our data science teams now have real-time access to Delta Live Tables using Databricks, giving them insights into the business for meaningful outcomes to business-critical issues,” says Kumaravel Vivekanandam, Director of Data & Analytics Platform Engineering at A&F Co.

“With the new platform and Power BI, we’ve democratized customer insights across the company,” says Nelson. “This means we can make informed decisions about future strategies and trends because insights are no longer siloed but available to all relevant teams, from company leaders to merchants.”

Freedom to personalize customer solutions

Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s successful cloud adoption is a tribute to its people and the collaborative culture it has fostered. “This culture has become an integral part of our cloud journey, with everyone working together toward a common goal,” says Summerlot. “Our approach emphasizes enablement and repeatability, ensuring that all teams are included in this journey—with no one left behind.”

“Our Azure cloud platform has improved the developer experience,” says Morr. “From a developer perspective, we’re able to move our applications and technology into a space that offers developers more automation, more resiliency, and more power to make changes on their own and in a safer way.”

The company is tracking improvements in operational efficiency, such as the reduction in time required for infrastructure provisioning and the increase in deployment frequency—moving from biweekly to daily releases, significantly speeding up development cycles. “Everything’s being realized in code—it’s very repeatable, very predictable, and it checks all the boxes from an operational efficiency perspective,” says Summerlot.

A streamlined omnichannel customer experience

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. now has a modern, unified infrastructure to support its omnichannel data-driven strategies. The company has streamlined its technology to make intelligent decisions across its business continuity planning, go-to-market strategies, and partner initiatives, for example, and can pivot more quickly to market needs by unifying disparate data—wherever it lives.

​“When I think about the benefits of Azure, three key metrics come to mind,” says Nelson. “We’ve tripled the number of models in production since moving to the platform, our time to development has drastically improved, and we began experimenting with generative AI within weeks of its announcement and had live use cases within months, something unimaginable with our previous stack.” She adds, “Most importantly, our personalized customer experiences have driven double-digit growth for over a year, clearly reflecting our ability to adapt and meet customer needs.”

“We’re transforming our customer experience by using data modernization and advanced data science models, allowing us to understand our customers better and provide the best recommendations and interactions, whether they’re in-store, on our apps, or on our websites,” says Morr. “It’s truly changing the way we interact with our customers every single time they engage with our brands.”

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