digital is commoditised. businesses are not.

the platforms are powerful, the APIs are open, and the promise of plug-and-play and AI driven retail is real. but your business - your processes, your data, your complexity is unique. and unique problems do not come with out-of-the-box answers.

focusing on the data-driven approach we help retailers close the gap between what modern technology promises and what their business actually needs to make it work.

arcretail was born out of a drive to provide a solution. digital moves faster than most retailers can keep up with and the technology industry has a habit of telling only part of the story. creating a digital storefront can be done over a weekend. integrating ERP, WMS, EPOS, 3PL, EDI, multi-channel operations, and distribution as just a few examples, cannot. yet too many retailers have learned this the hard way, committing significant investment to digital transformation only to discover that the hard, unglamorous work of connecting it to how their business actually operates was never part of the plan.

Simon Cruddas (find on linkedin) founded arcretail to help solve that problem, drawing on 25 years of technical and retail experience that spans both sides of the industry.

the first chapter was twelve years of digital agency life - living through the boom and bust of web 1.0 and web 2.0, building full stack technology, navigating web-scale challenges, and developing a grounding in development, agile delivery, all with the kind of get-it-done attitude that this time demanded.

the second chapter was thirteen years at Paul Smith, where the reality of retail came into full focus. scale, transformation, legacy systems, constraints, ERP, WMS, EPOS the complexity that no agency project ever fully prepares you for.

and in the final years of that chapter, the emergence of composable architecture, MACH principles, and headless commerce brought these technical and the retail worlds back together.

working with many modern MACH based solutions providers such as Centra (Ecommerce), StoryBlok (Headless CMS), Ingrid (Delivery Experience), Klaviyo (digital marketing), Sitoo (EPOS), award winning digital agencies like Limesharp, modern IaaS, SaaS, PaaS platforms like MS Azure and AWS, and data, analytics and AI partners Makutu/ANS within the the MS platform Fabric.

adding in on-premise development including ERP and WMS middleware, and bespoke applications in both .Net and PHP Laravel.

through all of it, the same building blocks remained constant - process, data, and events. they are at the heart of everything arcretail does.

we believe that a focus on these basic building blocks will mean retailers, on, starting, or resetting their digital journey will be prepared for what’s next.

forward looking retail.