emile bosch (ツ)

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Building 1-Hour Photoservice for HEMA

Client

HEMA

Year

2016

Category

Enterprise

Role

Lead engineer

The ask

HEMA, the store every Dutch person grew up with, wanted photo prints ready for pickup in any store within the hour. Order on your phone, pick up your prints with your rookworst. Simple promise, gnarly execution: uploads at consumer scale, a print pipeline, store logistics, and a national retail brand’s reputation riding on the ETA.

What I did

  • Designed and built the consumer-facing upload and ordering flow
  • Built the print-queue pipeline that routed jobs to the right store’s printer fleet
  • Integrated with store-locator and stock systems, and survived the security review
  • Worked embedded with HEMA’s teams and external print partners. Many stakeholders, one deadline

How it went

Shipped, nationwide. The service ran in every store; a sibling project let you put a photo on a cake, which taught me more about industrial food printers than I ever expected to know. The corporate part (procurement, legal, brand, security) was as much part of the delivery as the code, and it went just as smoothly.

60 min

upload-to-pickup promise, kept

every store

rolled out nationwide

1 cake

minimum, with your face on it

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