How Pandora Made Retail Transformation Stick

Retail transformation often gets framed as a platform decision or a single high-profile launch. In reality, lasting change comes from something deeper: an operating model that helps the business move faster, connect teams more effectively and turn digital ambition into repeatable delivery. Pandora’s transformation shows what that looks like in practice.

Working with Publicis Sapient, Pandora did more than modernize commerce or introduce new AI-powered experiences. It built the organizational and operational foundation required to keep evolving across markets. That foundation combined Programme NOW, a global digital hub in Copenhagen, cross-functional collaboration across marketing, commercial operations and technology, and a test-and-learn delivery model that helped new customer experiences move from idea to pilot in under three months.

The result was not agility as a slogan. It was agility as a practical system for transforming how commerce, fulfillment and service worked together.

Pandora’s challenge was broader than aging systems. Across markets, fragmented e-commerce experiences, legacy platforms and operational complexity were making growth and change harder. In some areas, unique customizations were expensive to maintain. In others, disconnected teams and third-party dependencies made it difficult to introduce new services, answer basic customer questions consistently or create a more unified omnichannel experience.

That meant the solution could not be limited to a storefront upgrade. Pandora needed more control over its technology, data and customer experience. Just as importantly, it needed a way for teams to work together that would support continuous change rather than one-time delivery.

Programme NOW became the vehicle for that shift. It was designed to rebuild how Pandora served customers across digital and physical channels, connecting decisions about commerce, order management and service instead of treating them as separate workstreams. Publicis Sapient supported this effort as a key global partner, helping align strategy, experience, engineering and platform execution around a shared transformation agenda.

A critical move in Pandora’s transformation was the creation of a global digital hub in Copenhagen. This was more than a location strategy. It was a way to bring core capabilities closer together so the organization could respond faster and operate with greater cohesion.

By concentrating digital development, analytics, operations, e-commerce and marketing technology in a more unified setup, Pandora created the conditions for better decision-making and faster execution. Instead of handing work across disconnected functions, teams could collaborate more directly around customer journeys, business priorities and market needs.

For global retailers, this matters because speed rarely comes from technology alone. It comes from reducing the friction between the people responsible for designing, building, operating and improving the experience. Pandora’s digital hub helped create that alignment.

One of the most important aspects of Pandora’s transformation was organizational. Publicis Sapient helped remove silos between marketing, commercial operations and technology, replacing fragmented execution with cross-functional ways of working.

This shift changed how the business delivered change. Marketing could work more closely with teams responsible for commerce and service. Commercial priorities could be connected more directly to digital roadmaps. Technology teams could build with a clearer view of operational realities and customer expectations. Instead of optimizing each function separately, Pandora was able to focus on the end-to-end experience.

That cross-functional model also helped the organization adapt when conditions changed quickly. Because teams were already working in a more integrated way, Pandora could respond with greater speed and confidence. This is one of the clearest lessons from the transformation: agility depends as much on how teams work together as on the platforms they use.

Pandora’s operating model was built to support experimentation, not just long-range planning. Using a test-and-learn approach, the business was able to move quickly from opportunity identification to customer-facing pilots. Publicis Sapient helped establish this delivery rhythm, enabling pilot programs to launch in under three months.

Those pilots addressed real business needs, including sales process improvements, customer safety, store capacity and more personalized experiences. They included virtual queuing, in-store appointment booking, click-and-collect, find in-store and store locators. These were not isolated features. They were proof points that the new operating model could deliver practical omnichannel value at speed.

For executive teams, that is the real significance of test-and-learn. It is not experimentation for its own sake. It is a disciplined way to reduce time to value, validate ideas earlier and build organizational confidence in a faster release cadence.

Operating model change only works when the underlying platforms can support it. Pandora’s transformation therefore paired new ways of working with targeted modernization across commerce and fulfillment.

On the commerce side, Publicis Sapient helped modernize Pandora’s Salesforce Commerce environment to create a more scalable common foundation. The work enabled a common codebase, shared functionality and more consistent storefront implementation across e-commerce platforms. In APAC, unique custom code was decoupled and rebuilt to remove redundancy and improve maintainability.

The impact was significant. The updated Salesforce Commerce application was deployed in just over two months. Release velocity improved from several months to a matter of weeks, migration time was cut in half and, after the first successful migration, e-commerce applications required no additional downtime. This gave Pandora a faster and more reliable path for ongoing releases and upgrades.

Publicis Sapient also helped strengthen omnichannel fulfillment by modernizing order management with IBM Sterling Order Management on Cloud. Initially focused on Australia and New Zealand, this work improved real-time inventory visibility, supported consolidated e-commerce fulfillment, optimized returns and refunds, improved ship-to-home and enabled services such as click-and-collect and store fulfillment.

Together, these changes reduced friction across channels and created better support for post-purchase inquiries. In other words, the operating model and the technology foundation reinforced each other: faster teams were backed by more connected platforms, and better platforms made faster teams more effective.

Pandora’s later AI work did not appear in isolation. It was made more powerful by the transformation that came before it. Once commerce, order management and service foundations were more connected, Pandora was in a stronger position to extend more human, context-aware support into digital channels.

That is what made it possible to scale AI-powered experiences such as Clara and Gemma in a meaningful way. A service agent can only provide useful order updates if order data is visible and connected. A shopping agent can only make relevant recommendations if commerce data, customer insight and experience design work together. The organizational agility built through Programme NOW created the environment where those capabilities could be introduced and improved as part of a larger system rather than a disconnected innovation effort.

Pandora’s story offers a broader lesson for retail leaders. Sustainable transformation is not just about launching a new platform, migrating faster or adding AI to customer journeys. It is about building the muscle to keep evolving across markets, channels and functions.

In Pandora’s case, that meant combining a common commerce foundation with stronger order management, a more unified digital organization and cross-functional delivery. It meant replacing silos with shared accountability. It meant using test-and-learn methods to move quickly on high-value pilots. And it meant creating an operating model that could support both immediate execution and long-term innovation.

When those elements came together, Pandora was able to do more than modernize systems. It created a more unified, scalable and responsive retail model—one capable of improving fulfillment, accelerating releases and later supporting more human digital service at scale.

That is what it takes to make retail transformation stick: not one initiative, but an organization designed to keep turning change into value.

Relevant Links

• Reimagining In-Store Magic: Pandora’s Agentforce Journey with Publicis Sapient
• Reimagining In-Store Magic: Pandora’s Agentforce Journey with Publicis Sapient
• The Operational Backbone Behind Trusted AI in Retail
• Pandora’s APAC commerce modernization
• Luxury and specialty retail has always relied on a kind of intelligence that is hard to scale: the ability to read the moment.
• Danmark: Fra global retailtransformation til mere menneskelige digitale kundeoplevelser (Europe)
• Cómo llevar la calidez de tienda al canal digital: lecciones para líderes de retail en México (LATAM)
• FAQ (FAQ)
• What to Know About Publicis Sapient’s Work With Pandora: 12 Key Facts for Retail Leaders (LIST)