New Way Now: Outfitting infrastructure to power seamless shopping and creativity at URBN

*Featured in this video:* Rob Frieman, Chief Information Officer, URBN *Executive summary:* URBN, a multi-brand, global lifestyle company, migrated its order management system to join other workloads running on Google Cloud, and adopted Gemini and Workspace to help power employees’ creativity. URBN is the parent company of Anthropologie, Free People, FP Movement, Urban Outfitters, and Nuuly, and after 55 years in business, the technology team continually reappraises how infrastructure is working to continue innovating new styles and products for customers. Adopting AlloyDB for order management led to a flawless holiday shopping season, with increases in speed, scalability, and reliability, plus cost savings compared to the previous on-prem setup. URBN has also adopted Workspace and Gemini across the company to help workers save time and focus on high-impact tasks. With the majority of retail products created in-house, empowering employees to focus on creativity is essential for URBN’s teams. *Challenge:* With a focus on empowering creativity and fast shopping experiences, URBN had to modernize its order management system to ensure a seamless peak holiday season, plus incorporate AI for employees to do their best and most productive work. *Solution:* Building on top of their existing Google Cloud services, URBN moved their order management system from on-premises to AlloyDB, designed for mission-critical workloads. The company also recently adopted Workspace and Gemini to help employees collaborate, ideate, and work more efficiently, with Notebook LLM especially popular. *Results:* Running the order management system on AlloyDB meant URBN could handle at least a 10x spike in volume, performance, and reliability, and performed flawlessly during the holiday shopping peak. Before AlloyDB, the technology team at URBN had spent many hours estimating the necessary on-prem resources needed, so they’ve saved a lot of time and now see much faster speeds on long-running queries. Bringing Gemini AI, Workspace, and Notebook LLM to URBN teams has enabled creativity, productivity, and collaboration across the company, such as in podcast production. *Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Rob Frieman, Chief Information Officer, URBN:* → “What is really critical in a partnership are the people. The people that we work with across Google really bring passion and creativity and commitment.” → “We had spent a tremendous amount of effort to ensure we had the [order management] app resourced at the appropriate level on-prem based on the prior year. That’s expensive. It’s difficult. Order management is the sort of thing you don’t want anyone to think about. Having it on AlloyDB, it’s rock solid, and in addition to that reliability, we’re seeing the speed of queries improve. This was the first year through the holidays we ran our order management through Google Cloud on AlloyDB, and it was flawless.” → “Our decision to move forward with Workspace was almost entirely driven by Gemini and the embedded AI capabilities throughout. That’s a critical component for every one of our associates to use the best tools at their disposal to bring products to market.” → “You need to adopt experimentation and innovation. We've really built this combination of strong innovation, having the courage to go fast, but also understanding when you need to adjust course. Nothing is different about that as you consider adopting AI or any other technology, the adoption of any new technology is going to supplant and disrupt something that already exists. So you should be open-minded about that.” *Google Cloud products used:* AlloyDB, Gemini, Notebook LLM, MongoDB Atlas, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI), Workspace *Learn more:* → How cloud weaves sustainability into the future of retail https://cloud.google.com/transform/cloud-native-sustainability-native-green-retail-rentals-nuuly-urban-outfitters → Trying cloud on for size: URBN’s Nuuly builds from scratch with Google Cloud ​​https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/customers/cloud-for-retail-helps-urbn-nuuly-subscription-service-launch