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“ With Fluent Commerce we found a partner that shares a high degree of strategic principles and practices of software engineering with the goal to not only meet customer demand but exceed their expectations .”

Intelligent SME . tech spoke to Westendörpf to find out more about the project .

What challenges were you experiencing with your existing e-commerce platform ?

If you start like Emma did in 2013 – as a startup – you design your IT systems with tools and knowledge available to you to get the business running and growing . In only a few years , we successfully scaled our business to more than 30 countries , to € 405 million in revenue and 1.5 million mattresses sold in 2020 . Although already running on the cloud , the existing e-commerce system had a legacy monolithic architecture with many customised extensions developed over the years , servicing the business as it grew . This inevitably accumulated a lot of functionality that did not provide distinguishing intellectual value to the company , but that nonetheless needed to be maintained and operated .

In this set-up there were a lot of hands involved to implement even simple changes and that prevented us from scaling our organisation . We had more than 30 market teams going through the same bottleneck of software development . That needed to change . Beyond scalability , another issue holding us back from becoming business agile was fragility . The technical debt of the old tech stack became a burden – often up to 30 % of development capacity was necessary to fix bugs occurring by unwanted side effects during development . And more than occasionally , the platform would break .

Reviewing the status quo and anticipating Emma ’ s highly ambitious business goals , it became apparent that the current technical landscape would not enable us to further scale our business as quickly as we did in the past . That is why we took a leap forward to modern software development and designed the e-commerce architecture of the future .

Why did you select commercetools and Fluent Commerce as vendors for this project ?

We defined key principles and paradigms of modern , cloud-native software development that the solution candidates would need to follow to match our expectations . Given the fact that website delivery performance is critically important for e-commerce conversion rate , and having our globally-spanning , fastpaced business in mind , we wanted to make sure the solutions could fulfil our requirements with the least effort possible – especially in terms of infrastructure . Also , looking into the future , we made sure the technologies we selected would not only work for e-commerce today but could support the challenges of the new and exciting area of sleep tech and IoT ahead of us in two or three years .

Part of these principles are flexibility , performance and organisational scalability , as well as a harmonised software development .

As these principles partly overlap with the MACH Alliance manifest , it is no surprise the solutions of commercetools and Fluent Commerce are part of our target architecture . commercetools was chosen as the vendor for the Emma e-commerce backbone , since it is providing the industry leading headless e-commerce platform and is highly flexible and extensible , with excellent developer tooling . Fluent Commerce OMS was selected as the best fitting Order Management System .

How did AyataCommerce enable a seamless implementation during the first phase of the rollout ?

AyataCommerce supported us to get going with the Fluent Commerce Order Management System and have it swiftly set-up and configured for launching our first two markets , Colombia and Chile , within just a couple of months . They are strong partners of Fluent Commerce and were able to immediately bridge the knowledge gap that occurs when

Previous page : Andreas Westendörpf , CTO at Emma – The Sleep Company . Pic : Moritz Reich

ENSURING WE BUILD THE BEST TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM THAT ENABLES OUR BUSINESS TO SCALE AND STAY AGILE IS KEY TO OUR SUCCESS .