Life Pharmacy is New Zealand’s beauty and pharmacy retailer, with over 50 stores across the country operating in a hybrid franchise/ownership model, and 270+ more under the Unichem brand.
Part of Green Cross Heath (a publicly trading company on the NZX), Life Pharmacy stocks some of the world’s best beauty brands, alongside pharmacy essentials, and is a household name across the country.
The problem
Life Pharmacy’s existing platform was old, outdated, and coming to the end of its life.
Rather than renewing the license and remaining on the Epicore platform for years to come, Life Pharmacy decided to explore alternative platforms that would give their internal team control of the digital offering.
The catch? With the Epicore license end date fast approaching, Life Pharmacy had less than 8 months to deliver a brilliant new customer experience, fully integrated into their existing platforms.
The solution
Pocket Square by Fusion5 worked closely with Life Pharmacy’s internal and external stakeholders, including teams from their POS and Loyalty providers to conduct thorough requirements capture and technical workshopping process, ensuring no stone was left unturned and every design, functional, or integration requirement was discussed, analysed and documented.
Out the back of this exercise, both Pocket Square by Fusion5 and Life Pharmacy had a detailed understanding of the project’s core deliverables, go-live must-haves, technical architecture and how each system and internal process would be run.
Following this, Pocket Square by Fusion5’s UX & Design Team worked with Life Pharmacy’s eCommerce and Marketing Teams to refine the new customer experience, ensuring that all technical considerations (and there were plenty) were factored in. This includes Life Pharmacy’s Living Rewards, complex shipping & fulfillment rules, and regulatory considerations surrounding pharmacist/pharmacy-only products.
Once we knew what was being built, we got to work, developing the front-end experience and complex integrations from scratch.
Working in tandem with Life Pharmacy’s internal technical team as well as external stakeholders from Toniq and Marigold, we were able to work through a significant amount of development in record time, ensuring that every piece of functionality was tested thoroughly by all stakeholders.
The result
The new site was complete will all phase one deliverables by the agreed launch date, having already gone through a thorough internal, independant and client QA process.
The entire project took just 7 months, 7 months shorter than a project of this scale typically takes. Pocket Square by Fusion5’s team was onsite to support the Life Pharmacy team on the launch date (we even bought everyone matching t-shirts to mark the occasion), but after an hour we could see it was working perfectly, so we went off to the pub for lunch.
Conclusion
This project showcases what’s possible when great teams unite around a common goal.
The commitment, late nights, and problem-solving spirit from everyone involved saw what typically takes 12 months, our combined teams accomplished in just 7!
This success story is a testament to the power of collaboration and expertise across organisations, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. We have continued our partnership with the Life Pharmacy team now they are running on Shopify Plus.
