Michael Lane

← All work · 2020

Premier Designs to DVTD

A new business on a new platform, revealed live on a date set seven months earlier

I led the transformation of Premier Designs, a 35-year-old direct-sales jewelry company, into DVTD, an online marketplace where every purchase gave back to a cause. A totally different business model on an all-new platform, built by a team of six, and switched on live, on stage, on the exact day we’d picked in January.

DVTD’s home page: Welcome to DVTD, a marketplace where every purchase gives back to multiple missions.Marketplace with a Mission: products from several brands, each labeled with the cause it supports.How It Works: every order gives back, plus more giving back from each product’s own cause.Our Causes and Our Brands, with a carousel of partner brand logos.Join Us as an affiliate, and DVTD Rewards for customers.

Launch month: August 2020

7
months to plan for one exact, immovable date
6
people on the team, me included
~10,000
sellers moved to the new model
10
virtual servers scaled up for the reveal

The moment

About a hundred people in the room. More watching on the live stream. Our VP of Marketing walked them through the new company, the new brands, the new mission, and then got to the part nobody in the audience could see coming.

The point.

Across the room, straight at me.

I flipped it. One switch, after seven months of work by six people: a new storefront, a new back office, a new portal for ten thousand sellers, ten servers warmed up and waiting.

Thumbs up.

And we were live. Just like that.

No spinner, no apology, no “give us a minute.” The old site was gone and the new business was open, in front of everyone, on the day we’d circled in January. That’s the whole job, really: make the hardest moment of the project look like nothing happened.

From jewelry parties to a marketplace with a mission

Since 1985, Premier Designs had sold jewelry through about ten thousand independent Jewelers and home parties. DVTD was a different business entirely: an online marketplace where shoppers bought from many mission-driven brands, and every purchase gave back to causes like anti-trafficking, hunger relief and job creation. New products, new partners, new rewards, and a new relationship between sellers and customers.

That meant nothing about the old platform survived. We replaced it all:

  • Retired a homegrown system running on Oracle.
  • Built the new storefront on Episerver, with .NET and Angular.
  • Integrated it with Dynamics 365 as the business system behind it.
  • Created a completely bespoke portal for the Jewelers, so ten thousand sellers could run their business in the new model from day one.

Six people

It was my team of six, and I was the VP. On this project I was also the product owner and the project manager, so the backlog, the schedule and the scope trade-offs were mine too. I did all of the Azure setup for the cutover myself.

How we made the date

A date announced on stage doesn’t slip, so we planned for failure instead of hoping against it:

  • A pre-mortem: we imagined the launch had gone wrong and worked backwards to every way it could.
  • A runbook for the cutover, step by step, with owners and rollback points.
  • A full rehearsal: we played the launch through end to end before the real one.
  • Capacity: we scaled out to ten virtual servers for the reveal, then back down.

On the day, it was boring. That was the goal.

Afterwards

A few months later, the company closed. The business model didn’t survive 2020. The launch did exactly what we planned, on the day we planned it in January, and I’m still proud of it.

I can ship. I can hit dates. I can execute.