A team of successful startup veterans came to us with a clear vision: an online store that sells consumables direct to consumers, with all the quality you expect from top brands, but without the overhead those brands create.
While Brandless had a growing team of their own, they wanted to accelerate product development in order to get to market as quickly as possible. Enter our elite team of product managers, designers, and developers — working side-by-side with the folks from Brandless — to design, build, and ship a highly differentiated e-commerce platform in under six months.
After our typical intensive kickoff with stakeholders, the blended Carbon Five & Brandless team began work on designs and set up the backlog for developers to get rolling. The tech stack was pretty typical for today’s mobile-first web applications — React on top of Ruby on Rails — but creating a completely custom store on top of the preferred product management system was one of the more interesting challenges. The up-front pain paid off down the road, and Brandless features unique product bundling and the B.More membership program.
As the private beta and eventual public launch approached, careful milestone planning, resizing work, and reprioritization was necessary — and the whole team chipped in to make sure delivery dates didn’t impact the product’s rollout. Behind the scenes, but integral to the platform-team’s work, the larger Brandless organization put their supply chain and marketing plan in place.
A few weeks after transitioning completely to the talented internal team, Brandless launched with appropriate fanfare, including reporting by Tech Crunch and the Today Show. The first weeks after launch saw products sell out quickly and heavy site traffic — but the platform’s performance didn’t waver. Since then, Brandless has sustained rapid growth and financial success … and Carbon Five has some new favorite office snacks.