how Sheertex invested in their team as a series B company

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Ecommerce: how Sheertex invested in their team as a series B company

Sheertex is an innovative e-commerce fashion company. Started in 2017, they created the world's first indestructible pantyhose made out of the same material as bulletproof vests.

What is Sheertex?

Sheertex is an innovative e-commerce fashion company. Started in 2017, CEO and serial entrepreneur Katherine Homuth and her team created the world's first indestructible pantyhose made out of the same material as bulletproof vests. They have thousands of happy customers and was even named one of TIME's 50 Best Inventions in 2018.

A screenshot of Sheertex's e-commerce site, their most important distribution channel.

We sat down with Sheertex's Director of Consumer Technology, Aidan Nulman to learn more about how they're using webapp.io to support the rapid growth of their e-commerce company. As Sheertex is a vertically-integrated manufacturer, their mission is to leverage technology to enable consistent customer experiences. For example, using consumer behavioral data to inform production of how much of a product they should produce to support sustainable fashion practices.

Tech stack: Prior to Aidan's leadership, the company ran solely on Shopify. However, rapid e-commerce growth meant they had outgrown some of Shopify's theming capabilities. Now, they're moving towards a trending "headless Shopify" approach, where the platform acts as a Content Management System (CMS) backend for the React site they are building out using Next.js and TypeScript. In this way, marketers and merchandisers can still manage the e-commerce store without being technical.

Testing specifically, they use Storybook (UI tests), TestCafé (acceptance tests), Mocha (unit and integration tests) and a custom A/B testing rig. They are using git for revision control, hosted on GitHub. webapp.io is used to orchestrate these test applications.

Before webapp.io:

Sheertex was running on a Shopify theme with no git and version control.
There was no structure established to ensure quality of code published, only duplication of Shopify themes
It was difficult to ensure developers publishing new changes did not break previous changes

When they were choosing webapp.io:

They moved to a git and revision control system, GitHub
They evaluated a couple alternatives to webapp.io
Ultimately chose webapp.io as it met their requirements as an e-commerce company

Why did they choose webapp.io?

Stable cloud-based Continuous Integration platform for consistent developer experiences
webapp.io automatically publishes changes to feature branches as their own website, enabling the webapp.io marketing team to review work alongside them without relying on developers to spin up staging servers or merge work prematurely
webapp.io has an API that triggers rebuilds off of a webhook in use cases where the team had changes to their product listings in Shopify or needed to update blog content in Contentful.

Why CI for e-commerce? Aidan says it's important for Sheertex to deliver "whimsical and stable shopping experiences to customers."