Retail commerce integration platform Patchworks has supported British heritage brand Belstaff through a major end-to-end digital transformation, helping the retailer replace a complex legacy environment with a unified, cloud-based e-commerce stack. The unified stack has also enabled Belstaff to launch omnichannel fulfilment capabilities, click and collect, ship from store, ship to store and flexible warehouse fulfilment.
Built for trading resilience
Led internally by IT Director Navid Jilow the transformation replaced virtually every core system across the business and reshaped how teams operate day to day. At the centre of the new architecture is a headless Shopify stack across ecommerce and POS, with NetSuite acting as the single system of record for inventory, transactions and financial data. Patchworks provides the integration backbone that connects and coordinates these systems, ensuring accurate, real-time data flows while delivering the visibility, control and resilience required to operate unified commerce at scale.
As part of the transformation, Patchworks supports not just Belstaff’s ecommerce operations but every physical store globally. Belstaff runs both its online channels and in-store transactions on Shopify, including Shopify POS, creating a single commerce platform across the business. Patchworks sits behind this setup, integrating Shopify with core systems such as ERP and fulfillment to ensure stock, orders and customer data flow smoothly and consistently across all channels, enabling true unified commerce rather than parallel retail systems.
Unified commerce transformation
Prior to the transformation, Belstaff operated a heavily outsourced and largely opaque technology environment, making change slow and costly. By bringing integration in-house through Patchworks, the business gained real-time visibility into system performance, clearer error reporting and the ability to respond quickly to operational issues.
Belstaff shifted to a unified commerce strategy to deliver consistent experiences in its physical stores and online, recognising that separate POS and ecommerce systems added complexity and slowed change. Since moving to Shopify, the brand has seen faster speed to market, lower total cost of ownership and higher conversion rates thanks to the simplified platform uniting POS and ecommerce under one system.
Following go-live, Belstaff has traded through multiple peak periods, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, without scalability or transaction volume issues. Patchworks has also supported ongoing optimisation, enabling Belstaff to adapt integrations as new Shopify features are released and business requirements evolve. All this has allowed the retailer to move faster without introducing unnecessary technical risk.
Becoming an AI-ready retailer
Looking ahead, Belstaff is exploring how AI can be applied across areas such as demand forecasting, inventory planning and multilingual content, building on the connected, accurate data now flowing through its core systems.
Navid Jilow, IT Director at Belstaff, said “For me, it comes down to control, visibility and how quickly you can react when something changes. With the right integration platform in place, you can see what is happening across your systems, spot issues early and fix them before they escalate. That shift takes you out of constant firefighting and puts you in a position where you can scale with confidence and spend more time improving how the business actually operates.”
Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks says: “This project highlights how modern integration platforms can play a critical role in large-scale retail transformation, providing the visibility and flexibility needed to support unified commerce, operational resilience and long-term growth. Disconnected systems quietly drain revenue, time and confidence, particularly during peak trading periods when there is no margin for error. Integration is no longer a background IT concern. It directly affects efficiency, resilience and brand trust. Retailers need infrastructure that scales with them, gives clear visibility across systems, and removes the friction that stops teams focusing on growth.”
It’s critical - 60% of UK retailers report financial losses caused by disconnected systems, according to the Retail Integration Report from Patchworks, based on a survey of 200 senior retail decision makers conducted by OnePoll. The research shows 10% lose over £1m a year, 48% lose more than £50k, 31% see losses during peak periods like Black Friday, 39% spend more time firefighting than driving sales, and 58% fear reputational damage from poor system performance.To read the full Retail Integration Report visit: ‘Retail Integration Report: Insights from the 2025/26 Patchworks Retail Tech Leaders Survey