Swiftly

Swiftly had signed a large national wholesaler representing 90+ independent grocery banners, with firm contract deadlines to migrate them onto its platform. But its content management couldn’t publish across dozens of retailer sites at once, and years of client-by-client content systems had left a fragmented patchwork that was hard to keep reliable at scale. Swiftly needed a trusted partner who could build multi-tenant CMS infrastructure fast and operate inside its own team.

Swiftly gives regional and independent grocery retailers a white-label digital platform, branded e-commerce, weekly ads, coupons, loyalty, and advertising, to compete with national chains. It serves both a B2C shopping experience and a B2B layer for retailers and wholesalers to manage their digital presence.

The multi-banner wholesaler deal exposed a gap: Swiftly had no native multi-tenancy for content, and building it wasn’t just about one deal; it was about platform stickiness and long-term retention. After difficult experiences with previous contractors, Swiftly wanted a product partner it could trust inside its codebase, not another vendor to manage. It brought in OAK’S LAB.

The mandate was to build content-management capability that didn’t yet exist: publish a single piece of content across dozens of retailer websites at once, manage banner-specific overrides, and do it all from within the Admin Portal retailers already used, in time for the first wave of live sites.

It also meant running the program management for the wholesaler onboarding itself, keeping the first wave on track for UAT and go-live, all as a strategic platform feature rather than another one-off client fix.

We embedded a dedicated team fully inside Swiftly’s organization, joining daily standups, working in their Jira, Confluence, and GitHub, and following their PR and architecture practices. We opened with parallel discovery, an architecture audit, a build-versus-buy CMS analysis, and an architecture proposal, which confirmed no third-party platform could handle Swiftly’s tenant and banner hierarchy, so a custom, platform-native CMS was the right path.

On time against firm deadlines. UAT and go-live were both hit on schedule for the first wave of banners, meeting Swiftly’s contract deadlines.

Platform infrastructure, not a one-off. Every capability shipped as reusable platform infrastructure. Leadership demoed the new CMS to another major multi-banner client, directly advancing a multi-year renewal.

A strategic retention moat. A platform-native CMS makes Swiftly harder to replace with external content tools, strengthening long-term customer retention.

Trusted enough to keep. At the engagement’s close, developers, sales leadership, and customer success independently advocated to keep OAK’S LAB on, from kickoff to handover in just four months.