Case Study: 1-800-Flowers achieves 10x faster mobile performance and smoother omnichannel shopping with IBM Hybrid Cloud

Creating a best-in-class online experience that makes it easier for customers to deliver smiles

1-800-Flowers turned to IBM to solve a fragmented master data problem that was hurting customer experience across its multi‑brand portfolio. The retailer needed a single, accurate customer view to support loyalty programs and fast, responsive mobile shopping; its legacy centralized MDM was slow (API responses of ~2,500–2,800 ms), hard to govern and exposed security risks.

IBM re‑engineered 1-800-Flowers’ InfoSphere Master Data Management into a master‑index enterprise ID approach, creating a lighter, more agile MDM architecture. The IBM solution improved data quality across ~70 million records, better protected sensitive payment data, enabled more accurate loyalty and marketing, and delivered a roughly 10x performance gain for the mobile app (API response times reduced to ~100–120 ms), producing a smoother cross‑brand shopping experience.

1-800-Flowers

Arnie Leap

Chief Information Officer