Fluid

Over the last ten years, Fluid has become the trusted partner that leading retailers such as The North Face, Calvin Klein, and Sears rely on to take their digital shopping experiences to the next level. Utilizing the Fluid Retail Platform, online retailers can build rich shopping sites with fully interactive product displays, dynamic pages with user-driven product design and configuration, and merchandising strategies that leverage social networking.

Fluid chose to partner with GlobalLogic through a nearshore engagement model to develop two new products for its Fluid Retail Platform. Fluid Configure would enable shoppers to build customizable products utilizing photo-real images, and Fluid Socialize would allow shoppers to discuss their purchases through Facebook and social widgets embedded directly into the retail website.

Engagement

GlobalLogic took responsibility for the majority of the Fluid Configure and Fluid Social development tasks. Utilizing Agile methodologies, GlobalLogic worked on everything from client-side HTML to server-side databases to 3D modeling platforms. GlobalLogic also provided Fluid with product enhancement services for its existing Fluid Retail Platform components, as well as solution implementation services for several of Fluid’s high-profile customers. Furthermore, Fluid leveraged one of GlobalLogic’s nearshore teams in Argentina to achieve a 100% workday overlap.

“I maintain the same level of trust, confidence and communication with my GlobalLogic team as I do with my in-house developers. It’s a real pleasure working with them; they’re my team,“ Andrew Guldman VP Product Engineering, Fluid.

Process

Fluid collaborated with GlobalLogic as a trusted R&D partner, giving GlobalLogic a general idea of what it wanted to achieve and then relying on the team’s ingenuity to realize its vision. One of the challenges behind Fluid Configure was to design a platform that provides retailers with a complex level of customization without impacting ease-of-use. GlobalLogic came up with a unique Javascript-based templating mechanism that enables retailers to easily customize as much or as little of the product as they want. Due to Fluid’s vision and GlobalLogic’s innovation, Fluid Configure and Fluid Socialize were eagerly adopted by top retailers like Reebok, Jansport, Vans, and Sears to enhance their online shopping experiences.

Outcomes

Fluid Configure and Fluid Socialize outperform other online retail solutions by 150-200%

Fluid is working with GlobalLogic to transition its entire solution to the Cloud

The Gloria Chatbot is based on an Arduino Uno microcontroller that is connected to a relay controller circuit with the capacity to simultaneously operate up to seven different relays. When a user gives Gloria a voice command, the signal is sent to the microcontroller via a BLE or wifi module and executed through a sophisticated system of connected networks (see below diagram).

Gloria diagram

The Gloria Chatbot — which was developed by Rajeev Bhatia, Deepti Arya, Jeevenjot Singh, Jatin Lamba, Aryan Singh, and Parveen Gupta over a period of 12 weeks — was a winning proof-of-concept in GlobalLogic’s Global POC Challenge, a competition that gives our global engineers an opportunity to compete against their global colleagues and show off their design, development, and presentation skills. Learn more about how the Gloria Chatbot works and was developed in the below video.