Bellroy Technology Team: 2024 in Review

Mike Webb profile image Mike Webb 2025-02-14

2024 has been a transformative year for our Technology Team as Bellroy continues to grow from its startup roots into a medium-sized company. We’ve tackled ambitious projects, celebrated significant wins, and learned valuable lessons – especially about how plans often evolve in unexpected ways when your company is scaling up.

One of our main focuses this year was streamlining internal operations through automation. Our Production team now has a much smoother product data process, saving hours of manual work each week. We’ve modernized our employee purchase program, letting our staff experience our customer journey exactly as other customers do – which has already given us great insights into our user experience. We’ve also automated much of our refunds processing, freeing up our Finance team to focus on more strategic work. While these improvements might not be immediately visible to customers, they’ve been crucial in keeping us nimble as we grow.

Our e-commerce platform saw some exciting improvements this year. We completely rebuilt our shopping cart, making it significantly faster and giving customers real-time updates about promotions and stock levels. We rolled out single-use promotion codes, letting us reward loyal customers with special offers without the usual worries about codes being shared widely on social media. We’ve also been continuously fine-tuning our checkout process through various experiments – though we’ll admit not every test yielded the results we expected! And of course, throughout the year we supported all of Bellroy’s product launches and campaigns, ensuring our platform delivered smooth experiences during our busiest and most exciting moments.

We faced our share of challenges too. Our attempt to improve our A/B testing capabilities proved trickier than anticipated, reminding us why maintaining our own platform can be harder than using off-the-shelf solutions. We attempted to migrate our legacy Rails solution to a more cutting-edge solution relying on AWS Cloudfront Edge Functions and Kafka. We underestimated the complexity in incrementally migrating away from the legacy system while implementing the new system, and were unable to complete the project in the six weeks that our Shape Up methodology dictates. We learned important lessons about what these technologies can and can’t do. Still, we remain confident that building our own technology gives us the flexibility and control we need to create the best possible experience for our customers; we’re taking another stab at a simpler solution in 2025 without the use of Edge Functions. It’s possible that if we’d persisted with our original plan we’d have succeeded, but be in a worse position architecturally. This is a major strength of using Shape Up - being able to intelligently adjust or stop work based on what you learn during development, rather than doggedly sticking to the plan.

We completed several projects this year where we aimed to automate manual processes for other teams at Bellroy. These were always challenging projects, as they required us to understand the intricacies of other teams’ workflows and systems. In helping us understand these processes, the teams often uncovered problems or inconsistencies that the teams themselves hadn’t noticed before the project started. While we think the projects added a huge amount of value, they almost inevitably produced outcomes that did not resemble the original plans. This was a good reminder that the best solutions often come from collaboration and iteration, rather than trying to predict everything up front.

Behind the scenes, we’ve made solid progress moving our legacy Ruby code to Haskell, resulting in better performance and stability. We’ve also improved how we handle technical documentation, setting up automated systems to keep our team’s wiki documentation in sync with our code. This might sound trivial, but it’s making a real difference in how efficiently we can maintain and improve our platform as it grows more complex.

A graph of Haskell vs Ruby lines of code since January 2022

We were proud to contribute to the Haskell open-source community in 2024, releasing the following libraries out into the wild:

Looking ahead to 2025, we see our role evolving alongside Bellroy’s growth. The Technology Team now splits its focus between enhancing customer experience and improving company operations. We’re expanding into new territory – from integrating with major Chinese e-commerce platforms to experimenting with alternative delivery methods in challenging markets. This year’s experiences have taught us to stay adaptable and embrace solutions that might look different from our initial plans. As Bellroy continues to grow, we’re excited to keep finding better ways to help both our customers carry better and our company work smarter.