Transitioning warehouse management systems is a feat of epic proportions. In this exclusive extract from Ragtrader's FREE Fashion eCommerce Report: 2025, The Iconic's chief technology and product officer Adam Cox reveals how the fashion platform did it in nine months.
The Iconic transition its warehouse management system over the last year. Why?
Our decision to transition our order & warehouse management system (OWMS) came down to future-proofing the business and ensuring The Iconic continues to lead industry standards and ultimately, create a better way to shop for our customers. The legacy warehouse management system (WMS), was not keeping up with the pace and growth of the business, leading to inefficiencies, bottlenecks and increased operating costs due to manual interventions. In order to position our operations for continued excellence, it was clear we needed a robust and scalable solution that would suit our current and future strategic needs.
Additionally, with a strategic focus on growing our B2B ecosystem, we needed a system that could unlock enhanced service capabilities, allowing us to rapidly onboard and scale comprehensive fulfilment services to a wide range of brand partners. With the new system in place, we can offer a range of flexible fulfillment solutions our partners can leverage, allowing them to grow their business both on and off The Iconic.
What were the key steps in transitioning the systems?
Warehouse management transitions are notoriously complex and risky, often leading to multiweek delays and customer dissatisfaction. Traditionally, transitioning to a new WMS would involve replicating most features of the old system, exhaustive testing in a staging environment, and a hard switch-over - where everything is qualified, tested and signed off ahead of time with a high cost of failure and no easy way to roll back.
Approaching the transition we took inspiration from our software engineering practices and opted for a more agile approach, gradually shifting capabilities to the new WMS. We began by testing the simplest use case: fulfilling a standard order, directly in our live production environment. This allowed us to identify failures, fix them, and repeat the process, gradually adding features and complexities in a live but controlled environment. This flexibility simplified engineering efforts and reduced project risks.
In the first six months, we gradually expanded the new WMS’s volume of live orders, starting at single figure orders and building up incrementally in larger volumes. This measured scaling enabled us to identify and resolve issues without causing significant disruptions. Once we had a stable solution in place, we expedited the transition, and within the next two months, we progressed to managing 100% of our stock through the new WMS, completing the transition in under 9 months.
A critical choice we made early on in the process, was to maintain complete separation between the old and new WMS, including allocating separate spaces in our warehouse for each system. As the new system was proven, we transferred the stock aisle by aisle without needing to physically move the products. This effectively transformed our fulfilment operations into a multi-WMS environment throughout the transition.
How long did it take and what was the budget?
We successfully transitioned our entire WMS in 9 months, however we were taking live orders through the system after 3 months. The entire project was delivered significantly under budget and two months ahead of schedule, without material disruption to the business or customer satisfaction.
Our "fail fast" mentality transformed each challenge into an opportunity for improvement, ensuring the system became increasingly robust and fit for real-world use. This strategy allowed us to swiftly identify and address issues, build confidence and provide staff training without undue pressure, whilst eliminating the need for stressful after-hours and weekend cutovers.
Were there any challenges?
We aimed to break the status quo of deploying only fully finalised and tested products into live production environments. While it required some persuasion of broader stakeholders, The Iconic is very comfortable pushing the boundaries of retail technology, so garnering support for a more agile, failure-tolerant approach was not overly difficult.
There were of course challenges that emerged throughout the process, but because we deployed the new WMS at such low volume, the issues were manageable, even if they were complex. For example, the first ever order fulfilled through the new system needed to be physically shipped at the post office. Because this was 1 order, not 1,000, the team were able to resolve and learn from the issue and ensure that our customers continued to receive the high level of service they expect from The Iconic.
This low-but-steady flow of orders also allowed our operations team ample time to train and adapt without the pressure of a full-scale roll-out. We were also able to facilitate cross-functional team interactions with live data, enabling them to identify issues, adjust processes and validate new workflows directly in production. For example, our finance team managed a complex integration between the ERP and the new WMS, handling critical aspects like write-offs, stock on hand, and stock inbound processes. Without access to production data, they wouldn’t have been able to perform such validation and make necessary adjustments.
Can you share any ROIs since transitioning?
Overall, the upgrade has been transformative, delivering significant enhancements across various facets of our operations. We’ve observed a substantial increase in operational efficiency, with automation rates and inventory accuracy soaring to over 99%, enhancing traceability and streamlining returns processing.
A great benchmark is the 2024 November ‘Seasons of Sale’ period, including Black Friday, where we saw 2.2M items ordered; a significant increase over the same period last year. We also broke records over this period, with over 115,000 items shipped in a single day - the highest ever achieved. Additionally, time to onboard new delivery partners has reduced significantly and can be done within 2 weeks compared to 2-3 months.
Beyond the immediate efficiencies, our new WMS enhances capabilities of our B2B service offerings for brand partners. The transition has streamlined our Marketplace and enabled Fulfilled By The Iconic (where The Iconic holds vendor stock and fulfills operations). Additionally, we will shortly see the introduction of our multi-channel fulfilment services, where brands will be able to cost-effectively streamline operations across multiple commerce channels using a single stock pool.
How does the system integrate with other parts of the business?
As a pureplay retailer, the system has to integrate seamlessly with multiple parts of the business from fulfillment and logistics, to our delivery partners and data and analytics. It is fundamental to all of the orders we fulfill, crucial to our success as an online marketplace and an integral step to enhance our services as a B2B ecosystem.
At the core of our fulfillment and logistics services, the OWMS is designed to streamline the movement of products in and out of our Fulfilment Centre efficiently. It is integrated with and leverages existing automated fulfillment capabilities, optimising placement and retrieval processes and enhancing speed and efficiency. Outside of the FC, the system ensures real-time updates and a cohesive shopping experience for our customers across our website and app.
We have also seamlessly integrated with our delivery partners to ensure timely and accurate order fulfilment, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience. Additionally, the new OWMS has integrated into our marketplace seller portal, providing a robust platform for our marketplace sellers, allowing them to manage their inventory and orders effectively.
The system also feeds into our data and analytics platform, providing valuable insights that drive continuous improvement in logistics and returns management. These integrations collectively enable us to maintain a high level of operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, reinforcing our position as a leading online marketplace and underpinning our capabilities as a platform business.
What technologies are you excited about in 2025?
This is a really exciting time for e-commerce and the next few years will be key in regards to the Australian fashion industry more broadly adopting and integrating new technology. Outside of fulfilment and logistics, we are at the beginning of a massive wave of Generative AI (GenAI) being integrated across the industry, and we are only beginning to tap into its vast potential.
At The Iconic, we’ve made remarkable strides over the last 12 months, leveraging both AI GenAI to enhance user experience and operational efficiencies. We have previously spoken about the launch of Multi Modal Search (MMS), powered by Google Cloud’s GenAI, which is making search and discovery more intuitive and effective. Customers can now successfully search terms like “dress for beach wedding”, and where previously this would have resulted in no results, now returns relevant and inspiring products.
We have also replaced the manual tagging of on-site product imagery with AI enhanced image-tagging. This technology automatically assigns up to 30 additional attributes to each item, significantly improving search engine visibility. With over 200,000 different items across the site and 300 new arrivals daily, we have not only significantly reduced manual work for our team, but have also greatly enhanced the customer search and discovery experience. Customers can also now search by AI driven filters on the dress category such as neckline, print style and sleeve.
In the very near future we will see more AI agents move from a concept to production, helping drive customer engagement, conversion and internal efficiencies. At The Iconic we have just rolled out our first AI agent, delivering a solution that produces AI powered product lists for campaigns from being provided a campaign brief, and we expect more to follow. This was a manual process taking a lot of time, the AI-Generated campaign product lists are faster to market and provide a wider assortment of products for customers.
Meanwhile internally, we recently rolled out Nexus, a generative AI platform for writing, coding, image creation, research and beyond. Over the last few weeks our broader team has been getting well acquainted with Nexus and my hope is that they use the platform like an assistant or extension of their team. There is so much going on in this space, and it will be exciting to see what the next 12 months will bring.
Read more fashion eCommerce insights in Ragtrader's latest report HERE. The report was sponsored by multi-carrier software company Shippit.