LUX Group

Lux Group’s mission is to provide their clients and customers with a truly exceptional experience. They are infused with innovation and creativity, having been recognized by BRW as the fastest-growing company in Australia. In 2015, Lux Group was named the #1 Business Leader by Deloitte.

With over six million subscribers to their websites in Australia and New Zealand and growing, Lux Group is a great example of innovation, product, and scale done right.

It’s been a long, great ride_

Postindustria and Lux Group have come a long way together. The Postindustria team helped them sustain rapid growth from a young startup that was merely a website offering discounts, to a global e-commerce platform uniting leading brands and platforms selling goods, services, and trips at great prices.

All along, the client provided the Postindustria team business requirements and goals, to which Postindustria provided resources and problem-solving on the fly, always willing to execute against plans to the maximum. It has been a great relationship all along; all product-related decisions were (and still are) made following discussions and brainstorms with Lux Group team members.  

If you want to know more about how we successfully achieved this challenge – you can find our detailed PDF case study here.

The full story_

Postindustria started working with an exciting new leisure brand e-commerce startup in February 2012. At that time it was then known as Aussie Commerce Group. In 2016, the company changed its name to LuxGroup, which most consumers know today.

When the project first started, the problem that the company aimed to solve was basic:

Provide access to products and services at a price lower than the market. 

As the Postindustria team got more involved in building out the platform of multiple brands, a new question emerged: 

What does the idea of the product mean? New technology? Integrations and growth potential? Features?

There were many challenges in building the complete product infrastructure, but not because of any advanced technologies. Most difficulties encountered were caused by Postindustria having to develop the complete platform out of an existing legacy one. 

Also, changes and new developments would often not only expand business logic, but would completely change it. Initially the product was built as a catalog feed offering discounts on goods. Later Lux Group started to sell deals – i.e. services offered at a discount – and then evolved into a product distribution platform with a fully equipped shopping cart. Lux Group even had a French branch with a completely different owner. 

Postindustria maintained great relationships with all stakeholders, solving problems on the fly and encountering new challenges as business requirements changed and grew. The number of settings, adjustments, administration, and reporting features inside the project grew rapidly, which brought new challenges and learnings to keep speed and fault-tolerance at acceptable levels.

Over the years, Lux Group has pursued every angle and opportunity imaginable in their product, and Postindustria has fulfilled all of their wishes and desires. On their journey they discovered that as long as the profitable direction could determine the priorities of the product, the company would be successful. In the long run, it allowed Lux Group to build a strong, highly successful business and platform – grown out of a simple startup that Postindustria took on early. 

How Lux Group differentiated_

In the early stages, Lux Group’s main differentiators were their speed of growth and the number of new projects in their portfolio. From a technical perspective, the true differentiator was in how easily new projects could be integrated (or migrated) into the platform – which was done by Postindustria’s design.

Now the major differentiator is how multifaceted and deep each partner brand can be, under one umbrella platform.  Lux Group’s travel deals service, a part of Luxury Escapes, provides the highest levels of customer service in the industry. It’s not merely a room in a hotel; customers get access to additional concierge-level services, privileges, and packages before and during their trip.  

Key Learnings_

Over the years Postindustria has learned a lot about:

• Transitioning from setting business requirements to starting the work process – particularly when there are numerous stakeholders, each with specific communication styles and needs.
• Maintaining service and infrastructure during irregular working hours in very different time zones (Europe <–> Australia).   
• Presenting deep technological insight – which balances the interests of a team and the discussion of development opportunities – with stakeholders. In layman’s terms: informing executives about technological constraints and proactively bringing solutions to the conversation. 
• Becoming business analysts when needed. Postindustria did analysis of the warehouse processes in a grocery business in order to develop a system that synchronizes inventory in stock with conditions at the warehouse (a completely different technological platform) and communicates with the platform’s back-office.