Richemont

Richemont is a global luxury goods group whose internal iOS application — TheView — is used by sales associates across 14 luxury brands to manage client relationships. Each brand operates independently with its own feature set and configuration, all running on a shared codebase.

I worked with Richemont across two consecutive engagements, each with a distinct scope.

The first engagement was a capacity problem: the iOS team had more work than one developer could handle and needed someone senior who could contribute immediately.

My background was in JavaScript and TypeScript, not Swift. I committed to learning Swift independently during the engagement, mapping concepts back to what I already knew and using AI tooling deliberately to accelerate the curve. Within weeks I was matching the output of the existing iOS developer — not by working around the stack but by actually learning it.

Beyond feature delivery, I consolidated fragmented utility code into clean, reusable structures and made UI/UX decisions autonomously in the absence of a dedicated designer. The engagement ended with Richemont wanting to continue the collaboration.

The second engagement started with a specific task: integrate a new maison into the platform. That work immediately surfaced a more significant problem.

The existing feature flag system had become unmaintainable — a five-level xcconfig inheritance chain that nobody could confidently reason about. The signal wasn't a bug report; it was the PM asking repeatedly which flags were active for which maison, because he had stopped trusting the system to be in the state he expected. I decided not to patch the inheritance chain to accommodate the new maison, but to replace it with something that could be trusted and operated by non-engineers.

The result is a four-layer provider architecture with explicit resolution semantics, per-maison JSON configuration that replaced the entire xcconfig chain, Firebase Remote Config integration for remote flag control without app releases, and a product-facing operational guide that gave the PM a reference he could actually use. The full design is documented in Feature Flag Architecture Across 14 Tenants.

Alongside the architecture, I wrote three Ruby scripts — flag creation, catalog validation, and matrix generation — that keep the system consistent by construction rather than by convention. Adding a flag, validating documentation sync, and generating the visibility matrix are all single commands. The matrix regenerates in CI on every relevant PR.

The speed of that delivery — architecture, tooling, and documentation in roughly three days — changed how Richemont perceived what I could take on. Shortly after, I became the sole developer of their eCard web application, a separate product running alongside the ongoing iOS work. My entry point was a technical audit and stabilization of a critical registration flow; I own ongoing development from there.

That expansion wasn't planned at the start of the second engagement. It was the direct consequence of demonstrating that I could handle complex systems work at pace, without hand-holding, and with enough care for the people operating the system to document it properly.

• iOS: Swift, Firebase Remote Config, Firebase Crashlytics
• Tooling: Ruby (flag creation, catalog validation, matrix generation)
• Web: eCard application (audit + ongoing solo ownership)