Not on the high street, this is a concept that is derived from the idea that microservices can help achieve massive growth in the retail industry. Not on the high street .com is thus, a company and an online marketing space founded in 2006. Its founder Holly Tucker states that small firms don’t have to copy big business. She started her multi-million-pound company from her kitchen table for targeting niche products. It focuses on unexplored potential and especially on people who have the talent but not the resources to succeed. Not on the high street .com employs more than 200 people and also empowers its own sellers. This is the inspirational entrepreneurial story behind a company that is home to 5000+ UK businesses. Unique gifts, homewares, and other handcrafted items are all available for display here to customers globally. With great success comes great responsibility and challenges.
NOTHS faces millions of daily hits and sees traffic levels spike to six times during the busiest retail times of the year. Such as on Black Friday or Cyber Monday and the present technology is also working well. However, to further expand their way into the new markets, the NOTHS team had hoped for business growth. For such progress, they need to ensure that their platform can handle several transactions. Be prepared to deal with a fluctuating retail market and capitalize on major business opportunities sent their way. The NOTHS team was also motivated to include diversity within their technology and services. This is by improving the JVM language platform. They will also gain insight into the benefits of the emerging technologies at present that are gradually being developed.
Being original is the key To Not On The High Street
The founder has considered it her motto that you don’t have to copy other businesses. You just have to look at things from a different perspective. Tucker set up Holly & Co, a consulting agency for small businesses just like she started Not on the high street venture. She is not starting the process all over again just continuing with her idea from 2006. Although her business has grown into a major brand, Tucker still believes it unnecessary to copy its big rivals. Her insight is to make mistakes and learn from all those experiences without taking any convenient shortcuts. Tucker has always been known for her vigor and ambition which earned her the nickname, Holly Hurricane. According to her, she does wish that she should have enjoyed her childhood and eased up a bit. However, on receiving the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) recognition, she feels it all was worth it.
She wishes to impart advice to people starting small businesses that they need to be strong and adamant. In the face of adversity or any mishaps, they do not need to lose heart. Opposition can be in the form of Brexit, the landlord putting up rent, or someone copying your designs. In addition, she feels small creative businesses require personal decisions as well. One must always follow their internal compass and gut feeling that will guide them to the correct path. Despite what others say, at the end of the day, it all boils down to what your instinct says about something. Tucker believes that apart from the challenges, the opportunities for not on the high street businesses have increased vastly. This is in fact due to the rise of social media.
Tucker believes that the landscape which is available today is the opposite. The one in present times is very different from the one offered to her 13 years ago in 2006.
Improvements in Not on the High Street venture
Not on the high street has partnered with Discovery and Delivery services. Discovery aims at personalizing and exploring each personal challenge faced by a company. Through their workshops, they bring in new expertise in technology and techniques. Face-to-face conversations with technical or non-technical people and a tour of the technical setup. This helps tell which tech stack needs to be worked upon. Thus, they will be moving to a Microservices-style architecture and approach. After accepting the proposal, the NOTHS team will be allowed to carry out the delivery. Foremostly, the POF (proof of concept) is built and then close working begins with the, not on the high street. Then pair programming begins to check the suitability of recommended approaches and strategies. A successful POC will then lead to hands-on workshops and knowledge-sharing sessions. The NOTHS team can then adopt new development techniques. This is behavior-driven design (BDD), distributed and cloud-native software and event sourcing or CQRS (Command Query Responsibility and Segregation).
Also, for ensuring that the NOTHS support and develop their new tech stack more steps were taken. This is by the recruitment and training of a new Java-based development team. OpenCredo proved to be of great help for broadening the tech stack. Java enabled NOTHS to recruit a larger developer network. This even added to the enterprise speed and stability. Their partnership with the NOTHS team was for a further six months. During this period they completed their technology transformation into a leading-edge platform. Then there was the migration of NOTHS’ infrastructure to the AWS public cloud. Automations and infrastructure-as-code formed a major part of this final solution. The various technologies involved were Mesosphere Marathon, Chronos, HashiCorp Consul and Packer, Docker, Apache Mesos and Ansible etc.
Final Takeaways
After the collaboration between OpenCredo and Not on the High Street, a responsive technology helped in the business’s growth. Not on the high street was made independent and able to rely on only itself. This was after a highly skilled in-house Java team approached them. They could even optimize their platform and all the resources available. Through the knowledge of all the technology options made available to them. This was a technology transforming initiative in which not on the high street .com benefited a lot from an experienced workforce. Joint conference presentations and blog posts help further this partnership in a delightful manner. Holly Tucker, the NOTHS founder is now also the UK business ambassador for creative industries and small creative businesses.
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