4 weeks to market: A new headless e-commerce platform for Hims & Hers

Industry

Healthcare & Life Sciences

Goals

Escape CMS & Commerce Lock-In

Solutions

Frontend DevelopmentDesign SystemsHeadless CMS

The Challenge#

In 2018, Hims needed a scalable telehealth platform to become a one-stop shop for medical advice and treatment. And with rapidly growing competition they needed to expand into new markets and product categories as quickly as possible.

Together, we created ForHers.com within 20 days, and upgraded their flagship ForHims.com.

In 2020, Hims outpaced Teladoc Health, completing 400,000 more consultations, over two years, than Teladoc Health completed, after nearly two decades of growth.

The Process#

Enabling rapid growth#

To manage and scale their portfolio for the next phase of growth, Hims needed to be able to experiment with new ideas and deploy new products quickly. Product and marketing teams needed to build pages faster and manage content independently of developers.

• We created a React component library aligned with Hims' brand image, as well as documentation in Storybook, laying the foundation for a design system.
• We reduced initial load time by 0.5 seconds by adding support for server-side rendering and optimizing images, componentized page layouts to ensure replicability, and modernized code stacks to enable faster page builds.
• We migrated Hims' platforms to Contentful, empowering product and marketing teams to build pages, test features, and release new content without developers.

The result was a scalable front-end architecture capable of launching new products and services in hours, not days or weeks. Hims created a regionalized European platform and launched ForHims.co.uk in 30 days following the US launch.

Improving customer experience#

Hims' customer-centric platform provides a seamless user experience across physician consultations, the online pharmacy, and medical information about more than 100 health conditions.

Our team worked with Hims to map customer journeys and write and integrate agile user stories into core workflows. Together, we identified pain points in the checkout experience and experimented with new features.

For example, we built an AI-enabled proof-of-concept algorithm to automate photo ID validation. We also integrated analytics using Amplitude and assessed the impact of new features on checkout flow and customer behaviour with A/B testing.

Enabling continuous improvement and delivery#

Hims was a digital-native startup that quickly gained traction in the market with customers and investors. However, existing processes were impeding their ability to ship. We helped them implement several DevOps and process changes.

• We worked with Hims to implement a DevOps practice for front-end developers.
• We integrated Contentful into Hims' continuous integration pipeline, enabling developers to work on React code and CMS changes simultaneously.
• Scrum teams resolved bugs earlier and reduced the burden on quality assurance with continuous testing involving unit, E2E, and acceptance tests.
• A scrum master implemented sprint processes and streamlined cross-functional communication, enabling Hims' engineering team to scale, align, and pivot with the business.
• Feature-focused scrum teams improved productivity by gathering feedback regularly, reducing context switching, and facilitating more predictable delivery.

The Outcome#

Taken together, the new headless platform empowered marketing and product teams to publish and change pages without developers and enabled Hims to continuously improve customer experience.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Hims continued to innovate, grow, and accelerate, as demand for online health products and services quintupled.

Hims went public in 2021 as one of the fastest growing direct-to-consumer healthcare brands globally and was valued, at the time of writing, at over $1.6 billion USD. Successful digital-native startups need to continuously innovate, grow, and accelerate as they acquire customers and gain market traction. Working with our advisory service and product teams will create efficiencies that scale — without adding to your headcount.