Rodd & Gunn eyes headless ecommerce

High-end lifestyle brand Rodd & Gunn is exploring a shift to a headless ecommerce platform strategy to improve its speed to market as its operations scale globally.

Once focused on the Australia and New Zealand’s luxury market for clothes and accessories, the company has since opened high-end bricks-and-mortar stores in 13 countries around the world, and recently entered the restaurant business.

The retailer’s digital marketing and ecommerce operations have had to keep up with the expansion.

It also has had to transform its logistics from relying on shipping from its Trans-Tasman supply chain to an international network of offshore distribution centres and dropshipping operations to get product to customers quickly.

Rodd & Gunn head of digital and ecommerce Angela Ward said the ecommerce expansion wasn’t as straightforward as the company hoped, with the company admitting to occasionally falling afoul of website regulations in other jurisdictions.

Speaking at the Sydney showcase of Salesforce’s AgentForce World Tour 2026, Ward said that Rodd & Gunn’s “lean” digital team, working with an outside agency, had managed to arrive at a method to get websites stood up within three months.

“We have a single codebase that gets copied across and then we have global templates that my team are able to … put relevant content in, but they're not changing things. The [product description page], the [product landing page], the checkout logic, the promotion engine, the promotion logic, are all copied,” Ward said.

Ward said that that the retailer is now looking to add Salesforce’s Composable Storefront headless ecommerce capability to its platform, adding to other Salesforce-based capabilities it has already incorporated such as marketing, data and personalisation.

“We are looking to go composable. So that's a really big thing for me and my team," she said.

"Bcause we have a small team, we want to reduce the reliance on development. We want to reduce the time it takes to get change to market."

The headless capability means that the retailer’s backend systems will essentially be uncoupled from its customer-facing frontend interfaces.

It means the retailer will be able to connect them to mobile and other channels rapidly and elegantly rather than relying on web design concepts like responsive.

The retailer is also seeking to add the platform’s native loyalty management offering, Salesforce Loyalty Management.

“We're also looking at loyalty because we need to enhance our loyalty program. You cannot remain a static, discount-based loyalty program forever. Customers want more from you than that,” Ward said.

Ward said that Rodd & Gunn is still in the early stages of exploring agentic AI but said the company had a firm rule against exposing shoppers to the technology in its ecommerce chat.

She said, however, that the retailer might look at ways AI can speed up customer interaction with its live staff by letting them use the technology to find what shoppers need quickly.