Kingfisher supercharges app development across its brands

“The new B&Q app has unlocked our product teams’ ability to deliver both our customer experience promises and business growth objectives for mobile.” Charlotte Regan, B&Q Senior Product Owner.

The challenge

Managing six major home improvement retail brands across eight European countries covering both the consumer and trade markets, Kingfisher was looking to improve its front-end technology architecture to make it quicker and easier to launch and update ecommerce applications across the group. This would help to optimise the buyer experience, driving loyalty, while also enabling Kingfisher to make the most of the latest technologies to streamline the online browsing and purchasing process, and boost sales.

Finding that the existing legacy system could not be updated sufficiently to achieve its objectives, Kingfisher bought in Mindera to address the problem. A new stable front-end architecture had to be developed that allowed programming code reuse, while easily diverging to enable the A/B testing of different features. The new platform also had to support the building of multiple ecommerce apps from a shared programming code base, which would help Kingfisher to shrink the app concept-to-launch cycle from over a year to just few months. This was no easy task, but Mindera was up for the challenge.

The solution

Having drilled down thoroughly into Kingfisher’s objectives, Mindera set about assessing all the available options to develop an architecture tailored to meet them. All possible coding languages were carefully analysed, from React Native, Xamarin and Flutter, to Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) and Compose Multiplatform. From the findings, Kingfisher decided KMP and Compose Multiplatform were found to be suitable. However, although they can be used in combination, Compose Multiplatform was deemed too immature to consider for the project, so only KMP was chosen.

Kingfisher wanted each brand to have its own dedicated app, which could be further developed and updated independently of the others. To achieve this and enable apps to be launched and updated quickly, a common KMP layer and user interface (UI) were shared as dependencies across platforms (iOS and Android) and all tenants, each supporting a brand app, to take care of the networking, caching and business logic between Android and iOS. In addition, each tenant was connected to a new API, built by Mindera in GraphQL, which was also used by the apps as a library, with the individual apps defining their own navigation and UI. As well as sharing the code across tenants and UIs across both iOS and Android platforms, Kingfisher also wanted to share the UIs across some of the apps. To achieve this, Mindera helped to create a native components library on each platform, featuring all the necessary buttons, labels and carousels – essentially, every component that exists on the UI. This could then be reused on any app.

This resulted in a groundbreaking multi-platform architecture with the following features:

• Shared UI components – That can be themed and customised per need.
• Shared features – Data, business logic, UI
• Architecture agnostic – Each tenant/platform can have its own
• Navigation independent – Each tenant can define its own
• Compose Multiplatform support

The results

By applying all these concepts across an incredible set of technologies, Mindera was able to build a system architecture that could support the delivery of all Kingfisher’s requirements. This includes handling several tenants, each with their own set of requirements and lifecycle, while promoting reusability between multiple teams. This enables individual Kingfisher brands to design, develop and launch a new app from scratch in just a few months rather than years. Consequently, it’s quicker and easier for the business to capitalise on the latest technologies to improve the customer experience and boost sales across it brand portfolio, which includes B&Q, ScrewFix, TradePoint, Brico Depot, Castorama and Koctas.

Two years after work began on the new multi-platform architecture, the first app was launched for major UK DIY retailer B&Q. Featuring over 1.2 million products, the app used 200,000 lines of KMP and Swift code, natively shared between iOS and Android. It enables fast and agile updates thanks to the lightweight, decoupled UIs and a best-in-class Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) system. “The new B&Q app has unlocked our product teams’ ability to deliver both our customer experience promises and business growth objectives for mobile,” said a delighted Charlotte Regan, B&Q Senior Product Owner.

Just over three months later, the first ever mobile app for UK builders’ merchant TradePoint was live, illustrating the development speed Kingfisher’s new system delivers. It offers trade customers access to thousands of products from their mobiles, making it quick and easy to get the item or part needed, as well as offering ‘Click & Collect’ or delivery straight to the job, and the option of shopping inclusive or exclusive of VAT. The app also features a loyalty membership section, a first for TradePoint, enabling buyers to spend strategically to optimise exclusive discounts and reduce costs.

Mindera will be working closely with Kingfisher to roll out apps for the remainder of its brands across 2025.

Find out how you can accelerate the launch and updating of your apps – contact our mobile team today.

About Kingfisher

Operating in eight countries across Europe under retail brands B&Q, Castorama, Brico Dépôt, Screwfix, TradePoint and Koçtaş, Kingfisher offers home improvement products and services to consumers and trade professionals both in-stores and online.