Lingerie and specialist adult retailer, Ann Summers, has completed the transformation of its data integration layer, partnering with commerce technology specialist, PMC, to streamline, modernise and future-proof its systems.Hailing ‘strategic progress’ in its business-wide turnaround plans, Ann Summers posted full-year revenues of £93.4m, up +0.4% year-on-year, in December 2025, with its focus on maintaining a strong High Street presence across 75 UK stores and expansion via third-party platforms helping to bolster performance.
As part of its transformation strategy, the lingerie retailer sought to modernise its core IT infrastructure, after its legacy systems had, through years of use, become overly complicated. This was making its tech stack not only difficult to manage, slowing innovation and creating operational friction, but also expensive to maintain.
“We’d gotten to the stage where we were continually building on top of things,” Jeannette Copeland, Technology & Supply Chain Director at Ann Summers, explained. “And that gets to the stage where you’re almost building on top of sand… we got to the point where we needed to dig in and change that.”
“With the most recent push from an AI perspective, unless you’ve got your data straightened out, it can hold you back. We are trying to ensure we’ve got foundations within our data so we can scale in the future and that we’ve got options, so we don’t find ourselves in a technical corner,” she added.
As well as resetting its core systems for growth, the transformation project also needed to support Ann Summers’ marketplace strategy. As a retailer of adult products, its website is often hidden from traditional online – and increasingly AI – search results, changing customers’ buying journeys in how they discover its brand and come to its ecommerce platform. To ensure ongoing visibility, Ann Summers wanted to create more discoverability across marketplaces and third-party sellers, such as Next, which also required it to overhaul its data systems set-up.
Partnering with PMC, having selected the commerce specialist due to its trusted reputation and best-practice execution, Ann Summers replaced its complex legacy integrations with modular architecture, migrating its data layer to PMC’s unified commerce platform, Graphene, in just three months. Built on a microservices API-led approach, cloud architecture and a headless structure, Graphene offers increased agility and scalability to meet dynamic commerce needs.
Working hand-in-hand with PMC’s team, Ann Summers reverse-engineered more than 100 integrations to create a new modern commerce platform, offering it flexibility through more composable architecture that could adapt as its business needs changed.
“By restructuring its data integration layer, Ann Summers has opened up a much more strategic way of using insight to drive innovation, bringing its data as close to the source systems as possible,” Elliott Winskill, Technology & Solutions Director, said. “By making that foundational data more strategic at the edge point, we’ve enabled Ann Summers to do more and, ultimately, deliver more, into the future.”
With Graphene, Ann Summers now has a reliable and cost-effective solution, which has not only cut integration and day-to-day running costs, but has also given the lingerie retailer the composable foundations needed for future growth and innovation, alongside ongoing support from PMC’s managed services offering.
“We are now ready to scale and have a technology partner [in PMC] who can advise, develop and support new integrations during our growth strategy. This benefits teams in both businesses and, most importantly, our customers,” Copeland added.
