E-commerce Reimagined: Tracking Whirlpool’s Path to Pragmatic Composability

"Composability" is a buzz term for a reason and Whirlpool’s commerce technology journey offers a prime example of these processes in action. Composable commerce, characterized by modularity, agility, and a focus on the consumer, is central to Whirlpool's strategy for success, enabling the company to adapt and innovate in a rapidly changing digital landscape. The company’s approach to digital commerce architecture prioritizes creating exceptional customer experiences, leveraging its multi-brand portfolio across multiple countries, and emphasizing both rapidity of learning and speed to scale. On August 29th, Albert Guffanti, VP, retail technology group sat down with Whirlpool's global data, technology & transformation officer, Murat Genc, VTEX’s founder and co-CEO, Mariano Gomide, and Justin Honaman, head, worldwide consumer products & retail GTM and head, worldwide food & beverage at AWS to delve into the transformational impact of this "pragmatic composable commerce” strategy, and how Whirlpool has responded to market changes and uncertainty by continuously improving its products and supply chain capabilities. Albert Guffanti: Today we’re joined by VTEX and Whirlpool to talk about Whirlpool's digital transformation, powered by AWS, in an exciting topic called, “The Whirlpool Transformation: Revolutionizing E-commerce with Pragmatic Composability”. My name is Albert Guffanti, and I run the retail technology group here at EnsembleIQ, as well as the consumer goods technology media brand, which is presenting this webinar. We’re going to have a great discussion around Whirlpool, which is a renowned brand with a 111-year history and worldwide operations. We'll take a deeper dive into how Whirlpool recently established itself as a growth leader in the e-commerce market by unifying its e-commerce technologies with a pragmatic approach to composability. What does that mean? We're going to really explore how Whirlpool modernized its e-commerce architecture while keeping costs in check, learn how Whirlpool successfully balanced innovation and cost control, paving the way for scalable and flexible modern architecture that resulted in an enhanced online customer experience, increased online revenues, and efficient management of global sales operations. There are a lot of great successes to talk about, including the how — how did they do that. We have an extremely talented panel to lead the discussion as we delve into Whirlpool's digital commerce transformation story. Joining us are Mariano Gomide, founder and co-CEO of VTEX; Murat Genc, global data technology and transformation officer at Whirlpool; and Justin Honaman, head of worldwide retail and consumer goods go-to-market, and head worldwide food and beverage at AWS. It's a pleasure and an honor. Justin, can you kick off the discussion for us? Justin Honaman: Thank you, Albert, and thank you for your partnership. VTEX is one of AWS’s extraordinary partners in the commerce space and Whirlpool is an amazing worldwide customer of ours. The story today is an interesting one because it's not just a customer — it’s a triple threat of us, a partner, and a customer. I'll provide a bit of a setup on our approach to the industry, in case you haven't worked with AWS in the past. First, I’ll share some of the insights and metrics around why this space is so hot right now, and why it has been just booming the last couple of years. Then, I’ll hand it over to Mariano and Murat. Hopefully you know Amazon, the vision is to be Earth's most customer-centric company in the consumer products or manufacturing space. We're focusing on helping companies, such as Whirlpool, build great brands that consumers love. We like to say we're builders — we're known as builders here at AWS, and we're builders of brands. We get to work with extraordinary brands to help them launch, grow, and evolve brands worldwide. We also work with companies on the route-to-market and supply chain space. It’s an area we're known for here at Amazon, and an area that we have really advanced in terms of taking capabilities from what we've learned at Amazon and bringing those to market with partners like VTEX and others in the operational space on the retail side. The conversation today will sit between these two industries. On the retail side, we say we're born from retail. AWS was born in 2006 as the platform on which amazon.com was built, a leader in the cloud space for 6-7 years. There was no other in the cloud space, except for AWS. We're born from retail, and many of the services and capabilities that have been launched and grown, have come from retail — it’s pretty extraordinary. The company is focused on frictionless and unified commerce, which has been the buzz — front and center — since NRF in January of this year. Looking at last year, there was a significant increase in the interest around commerce platforms and evolving those commerce platforms. Again, on the retail side, a lot of customers ask us for help around inventory placement, inventory visibility, store ops, planograms in stores, and many retailers are growing stores. That's where we focus. Diving into today's conversation, this is such an important topic because of the whole idea of commerce: Thinking of commerce in new and different ways and expanding how you engage with end customers. Looking at the numbers, 81% of brands plan to deploy a unified commerce platform by the end of this year, 30% of customers or shoppers are more likely to shop a brand over and over again when they're engaged across channels, and 90% of shoppers just like us expect a consistent interaction — think about those numbers. If I go in a store, online, call the manufacturer — I'm engaging on an order. Eighty-three percent of customers say the convenience in shopping is more important today than ever, but convenience is only possible when you're able to provide a platform that engages across channels. It helps when the support for that platform is grounded in data. You’ll hear a lot today about the importance of data and a strong data platform to drive interactions. The whole idea of unified commerce is a framework AWS has been using this year and last to frame this idea of thinking about getting beyond the silos. Now, many of you have heard the word omnichannel and will see the progression from single channel to going to market in multiple channels too and trying to have an omnichannel approach. If you're in the retail or manufacturing space and have a D2C platform, have an e-commerce presence, that omnichannel worked for some but not others. Now what we’re seeing is a focus on unified commerce. A couple other buzzwords you've probably heard around the space include: API-led, headless, composable. Those types of elements go into a commerce platform and enable a lot of the capabilities around things like multiple payments, multiple routes to market for delivery and distribution, pricing and promotions, and so forth. This gives you a bit of a framework, again, as to what we are doing here at Amazon and AWS, and what's important about this space as you're thinking about the conversation. With that, I'll hand it over to Mariano. Mariano Gomide de Faria: Justin, thank you. Murat, could you share a bit about the Whirlpool Corporation, what it is, and its reach around the world? Murat Genc: Whirlpool is a global household brand. It's a 111-year-old company that has been improving the lives of people in their homes with appliances, products, and services. We operate in more than 50 countries with a multi-brand portfolio, including Maytag, Jennair, Whirlpool, Brastemp, Indesit, and even brands such as Yummly, which is a recipe and smart cooking platform. It's a rich portfolio of brands to improve people's lives at home. Gomide de Faria: On the digital commerce landscape, could you describe the GTO commerce architecture that you built at Whirlpool, the core technologies, and why you chose the path that you chose? At the end of the day, to manage a global company Whirlpool is not an easy thing. You are one of the CIOs or executives in the IT sector that I most admire because you make it simple. I believe simplicity is the word of the moment, and you’ve been on this for a while. What is the digital commerce architecture that you chose to build in Whirlpool? Why did you choose this path? Genc: It's a great question. When we think about a couple of principles and drivers on why we chose the path we have chosen. First, we would like to create great consumer experiences and value for them. It goes hand-in-hand with our products, with all the content we create for them to better use our products in their daily lives. It also creates great experiences across channels and creates that lifetime relationship with our consumers. Typically, consumers are loyal to their appliances, their brands, and it's a long relationship. Managing that experience, the lifetime value of the consumer, and the relationship is key. Secondly, it's about the marketplace. We operate in more than 50 countries with a portfolio of more than 10 brands. We need to make sure we are actually leveraging that portfolio and that rich landscape of different markets where we can seamlessly reapply great innovation happening with one brand, one country in other places. What we go after is not just speed of learning, which is very important, but also speed to scale. If you create a great experience and optimize your conversion funnel in your e-commerce in one country for one brand, that's great to learn. However, what truly creates value and impact for many more millions of consumers, and for the total company, is at which speed you can scale those learnings. We go after both the speed of learning, which is that of experimentation, but also speed to scale, which is that broader impact in millions of consumers' lives as well as in multiple countries and brands for Whirlpool. Finally, the other principle is that it's important to have the right hands-on-keyboard skills on the business side. That way, the solutions and technologies we are building should be fit for a hands-on-keyboard, but at the same time, it needs to be composable. It's a hybrid model where we have in-house components and components platforms that we are buying. We need to engineer and integrate those different components seamlessly so that it's evolving, modular, and we are not too dependent on any single technology. We can go at the pace of the consumer. Those are the three principles we follow. With that, the architecture we build follows those microservices, API-first, headless, cloud-native type of model where we have the underlying data, AI foundation, and infrastructure. Then, we put the right e-commerce platform, order management platform, experience management platform, and it's all supported by tools such as performance marketing tools, analytics tools, as well as developer tools. That way, we can continuously run a pipeline of new integrations, new components, new developments. One of the reasons we have chosen this path of a unified e-commerce platform is because you do not want every country, every brand reinventing what has been already invented. In order to benefit from Whirlpool's global scale, you need that balance between real capabilities — I call them Lego blocks — that you can use to create great experiences in a country or brand based on the consumer and their needs in that region. At the same time, whatever you are building, typically they're relevant for other countries and other brands. That unified e-commerce platform architecture enables us to massively scale experiences that are working well in one country with one brand. Gomide de Faria: You mentioned the Lego, and the ability of doing multiple modules and independent modules. That also can be a trap if you’re not conscious of the cost. One of the side effects of a very enhanced freedom for IT is that every single department on business, finance, HR, and any single department, will choose multiple softwares and everything needs to work together. But at the end of the day, it can end up being a tax spaghetti, too complex, or too expensive. On the other hand, if you put this in one, the only thing is actually blocking yourself. When building an e-commerce tech stack, how did you balance making the right technology investments with profitability in mind? How did you manage the costs? You are a big fan of composable commerce, can you tell us about the architecture that allows you to test without a big CapEx. Genc: I'm blessed that we have a very strong, very engaged global digital community of experience and practice here in Whirlpool. Essentially, we bring all the key leaders from business, technology, sales, marketing, supply chain perspective — all the people who are enabling and leading the e-commerce business with Whirlpool —together as part of that, we call it DCOE. We drive a lot of reuse, share and reapplication of what works well, what we are learning. Our motto is not just to share the learnings, which is important, but the cloud infrastructure enables us to share code instantly. In my experience, people might be sharing learnings in a PowerPoint and expecting others to learn, then build it by themselves. We switched it here at Whirlpool. Our motto is, yes, we need to drive that sharing, learning, training, upskilling, but we don't want to just share learnings. We want to share code, share applications, share new content solutions, experience, or algorithms that work in one country and we would like to make them available to all other countries and brands instantly. That's why we curated what we call this e-commerce marketplace. Now, there are more than 40 countries using this e-commerce marketplace. Whenever there is a new business need, they can check what is already there, what's already working — it could be built internally or it could be an external component that has been used by some other country or brand. Instead of starting from scratch, they can take that from that marketplace, seamlessly integrate it to their unified commerce platform, and start delivering value. Think about the speed and cost efficiency that creates. A lot of the time, waste comes from having to relearn, rebuild the same thing that has been already built. By creating the e-commerce marketplace and the unified e-commerce platform, it actually creates a lot of cost efficiency for us. Number one, getting both the people to share and reapply learning, as well as the reapplication of code, applications, and experiences — that's the first thing. Gomide de Faria: To clarify for the audience, when you mention e-commerce marketplace, it's nothing like Amazon. It's not a B2C marketplace, but a software applications marketplace where the units of Whirlpool can choose to be as complex or as simple as they want and enable them to test. This is what we were talking about offline as the building economy, testing economy, and allowing each region to test a new search, new comments tool, or a new payment in a fraction of the time that used to be before. Transforming what were projects into testing things. This is something that I admire a lot in Whirlpool. Murat, you shaped a policy or culture of being proud of testing, not of building. A lot of legacy organizations have the IT peer bringing things in and not proud of testing what is already there. You are not only doing with third-party vendors, but also country to country allowing them to share and test things that other countries did. This results in incredible experiences. This vision of modularity, which we can call the composable commerce approach, the composability. Gardner is starting to call these “pragmatic composable commerce” because you have the freedom to choose, but also the freedom to build. This is an example of what Whirlpool is using around the world, and it's pretty successful. We are proud because Whirlpool can be a benchmark for the industry — since Whirlpool is not a technology company, the press is not covering Whirlpool as they should. Whirlpool might be the go-to company in terms of modern technology in the world and the world needs to know that. Let’s talk about more on the third topic here, it's about the main changes. Murat, in the last four years we saw big changes, such as the pandemic, come. Consumer goods companies were without inventory, plants were down. Then, consumption came back pretty high and the volatility was there — still there. What are some of the main changes you have seen in the last four years, and how does Whirlpool adapt to this new reality? Genc: We have seen some irreversible changes in consumer/customer expectations in digital and e-commerce around the world, in the ways we work, collaborate, and live our lives. There have been significant changes, one of which is moving into more hybrid models. For our consumers, this means they spend more time at home, they actually use our appliances more. That increases the demand for not just products, but also content and new features. For example, on the IOT side in appliances, sometimes the best day of the product is when you buy that product. We are reversing that. When you buy a connected Whirlpool appliance, that day one is great, but we also would like to continuously improve the appliance, the functionality, and the value you get out of it with over-the-air updates to get new features. During the pandemic, one of the updates we did was an air fryer functionality to our smart ovens. We have seen that people cooking more, and would like to cook quickly. We were able to update our ovens with smart functionalities over the air so that they have a better product now, suddenly. That's one, people spending more time at home using our products more and how do we continuously improve that product experience. The second change has been related to those consumer expectations. Before we were talking about 48hour deliveries, but during COVID it became more like 24 hours, two to three hours. That's not going back. Consumer expectations are a lot higher now in terms of speed of delivery — that requires a different supply chain, a different consumer service that we needed to upgrade in our supply chain capabilities in our infrastructure. From an engineering perspective, an e-commerce perspective, we needed to make sure our teams around the world can seamlessly collaborate. We have engineering hubs around the world to build these global platforms and enhance them continuously, as well as teams in every country to innovate and experiment with consumers and customers. How do we make sure they seamlessly collaborate together in a hybrid working model? That was definitely one of the things we needed to do and I was happy to see, especially our technology teams, to adapt this new hybrid model fast. The world has probably made more than 10 years of progress in digital and e-commerce, both in terms of the business size, as well as learning. We’re happy to see how accelerated the learning of our teams were across all functions, and how much that accelerated our progress in terms of growth from an e-commerce channel growth. Consumers have different higher level expectations from a seamless omnichannel experience perspective — that's really important — whichever channel they choose to interact with us, whether it's in the store, through the call center, social media applications, mobile apps, or website, we make sure we can seamlessly create those experiences and serve our consumers. Bringing the data and knowledge across all those channels is important because that also became a default expectation. Gomide de Faria: Whirlpool uses what you call a connected marketplace to deliver technology to all the regions — let's call it a live connected marketplace. Of course, Whirlpool uses VTEX as the backbone for this connected commerce, serving you in more than 35 countries, including regions of top volume for D2C. What can you say about using a composable commerce architecture to deploy a unified commerce experience for the Whirlpool consumers all over the world? You have an amazing D2C experience, maybe a go-to case study for other consumer good companies. What can you say about using these composable commas as your core strategy, and how have these accelerated or transformed the company itself? Do you see a long-term use of this kind of approach? You are not young in this industry, you have been through the waves before this testing economy. Now that we are on this, do you believe this is going to rest in front of us for many years? Can you share your vision on composable commerce architecture to deliver a unified commerce experience? Genc: Certainly, I have enough battle scars, like you Mariano, from an e-commerce technology and data perspective across Europe, China, the U.S. Composable architectures — you can call it microservices, Lego blocks, however you would like to name it. They are here to stay because this is the domain where the speed of change is a lot faster than some of the other enterprise technology domains. To be in the forefront and respond to that speed of change, you need that composability, that modularity. That's really important. We should always remember technology is not the end goal. The end goal is to create great value in consumer's lives, create great experiences. We need to make sure we have the right people, technology, and process capabilities that are there to enable these superior experiences, continuously improve those experiences, and then drive global scale. Having that unified platform and the freedom in a framework across different countries and brands to get the best speed of learning and the best impact from scale seamlessly is important. Especially for companies who are operating in multiple countries who have multiple brands in their portfolio, that's the second thing. Then, third, what we would like to drive is as similar as possible and as different as needed. You get the best of things that are very local and derive that local experience with consumers and customers, but then also get the right reapplication. A platform, a technology foundation, and an organization model enabling that is really important. Therefore, we also moved into agile DevSecOps, digital product management practices in our organization with our talent. We have up-skilled and trained all of our organizations from a digital product management perspective because you need to manage those platforms and technology as a digital product around the world. Some of those fundamentals are here to stay, as well as the importance of having the right infrastructure, the right supply chain, and seamless capabilities. I'm a huge fan of hands-on-keyboards where we are continuously testing and learning. When I lived in China, I was amazed by Double 11 and over time started thinking about this type of guidance or vision for our teams. If we are able to run every day like it's a Black Friday, or it's a Double 11, that's massive. The technology needs, the people needs, the data analytics needs are also massive — it's real time. How do you create that real-time operating model? How do you create that real-time technology foundation, data foundation? If you are able to operate your e-commerce like every day is a Double 11 or a Black Friday, think about the impact that can create. That's our motto here, and hopefully some of these learnings over time are helpful for others. Guffanti: Thank you Mariano, Murat, it was great to be a fly on the wall for that discussion. There’s so much information to extract all of the nuggets that you just gave us. You provided a great illustration of the complexity, but also the flexibility that you've created in your architecture. There are a lot of questions centering around how you developed the flexibility, how you tie that with consumer experiences, and how you create a unique architecture that listens, that reacts, and that adapts along the way as well. Can you share some parting thoughts as we wrap up here? Mariano, what advice do you have for any consumer goods executives who are leaning in and want to get started on the journey? Gomide de Faria: We cannot ignore the moment that we are in. Interest rates are at a peak, the cost of the money is pretty high. The IT that was a reality of unlimited money for the last 15 years, now needs to face the destiny that we need to be efficient. One thing that I admire a lot in Whirlpool, and Murat's administration, is IT for business purposes. They don’t implement anything if there is no business purpose. The tip that I can give for executives is: In a world where the money has a cost, you don't build by building it, you move your mentality from building to testing because you're going to provide a much better outcome for the business in a fraction of the time. My tip is that the composable commerce architecture provides unified commerce experiences allowing companies like Whirlpool to go for a small country with a small volume, with a simple architecture, and go live in 30 days. But in countries that have billions of dollars and complex scenarios, they can build custom things, use third-party tools, and share technology between countries in a seamless way. Embrace the testing economy, get rid of the building economy. Guffanti: Excellent, thank you. Murat, what is your advice for the audience on how, what to focus on as they start out? Genc: Everything starts with the consumer, the people we serve, improving their lives, and the speed of learning experimentation at the same time, the speed to scale. Making those two work together, as well as bringing the right people capabilities, organization, process, and technology capabilities together to be able to operate in a more agile way with the right cost efficiency, as Mariano mentioned. We are able to launch new countries within weeks. We are able to scale new functionalities within weeks. That marketplace, that composability is really important. Frankly, great partnerships, also, are always important. You can never do this all by yourself. Having great partnerships, having internal engineering technology product capabilities, but also having great partnerships — Mariano is a great partner — is always key. Guffanti: Justin, I know you mentioned the triple threat, so what are your parting words? Honaman: My last words are, thank you. Thank you VTEX and Whirlpool. We appreciate your partnership, we appreciate you as a customer. We learn from you, enjoy engaging with you, and appreciate the level of partnership and engagement with you all worldwide. Guffanti: I'm going to extend that spirit of thank you to our audience, as well. I hope you found this to be valuable. I also want to thank our panelists for your extremely valuable insight today. Thank you for taking time out and telling your story. Thank you all, I hope you enjoyed the webinar, and we'll see you soon

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