Laura Ashley is an international retailer with a brand that has grown into one of the world's best-loved and most successful home furnishing and fashion companies.

Through a strong global brand strategy, leadership, investment in stores, and mail order channels Laura Ashley has provided a solid base upon which the company is progressing.

Laura Ashley already had a successful mail order business, so to develop an e-Commerce site was a natural progression to strengthen their reach to the UK market and to support their brand strategy.

The initial objectives for Laura Ashley were to establish a presence on the web that represented the Laura Ashley brand and create a site that could function as an extension of the retail and mail order business.

Work had already begun on the creation and design of a site employing IBM WebSphere. However, this ran into difficulties early in the development. As Laura Ashley had a strong relationship with IBM, they made a decision to seek assistance in finding an IBM partner that knew the technology and had the skills and experience to design, develop and deploy a complete e-Commerce solution. CSI were initially engaged to troubleshoot the original implementation, however, it quickly became apparent that to cease all work and to re-develop the site from scratch was the most efficient approach.