Direct Mattress Company Designs its Dream Commerce Architecture to Support Global Expansion

Emma, one of the world's largest direct-to-consumer mattress brands, is expanding at a blistering pace. However, its legacy commerce platform was incapable of keeping up. As the company prepares for continued growth and expansion into new markets, it looks to commercetools as its new, best-of-breed commerce platform.

Since the company's launch in Frankfurt, Germany in 2013, Emma has been bursting at the seams, spanning 30 countries and five continents, to serve customers who crave the comfort of its innovative mattresses.

In 2020, Emma sold 1.5 million mattresses, including its popular foam Emma Mattress, ordered online and delivered in a box. Emma sells 80 percent of its mattresses online and the rest through more than 200 retailers with 3,500 stores worldwide.

The company continues to expand globally, bringing new sleep products to market as it transitions from being a mattress company to establishing its position as the No. 1 global sleep brand. In 2021, after achieving a staggering 59 percent revenue increase to €645 million, Emma discovered its legacy commerce systems were impeding its ability to adapt and scale with new software development, thus hindering business innovation.

Emma needed new technology to keep up with customer demand and provide an infrastructure that scales easily with future growth and adapts to changes in real time.

"It became apparent that the current technical landscape wouldn't enable us to scale our business further as quickly as we did in the past," said Emma's Chief Technology Officer Andreas Westendörpf. "We needed a new solution that supported modern software development and an e-commerce architecture that could support our future growth and innovation."

A New Commerce Architecture

Emma began developing a new composable commerce architecture comprising of commercetools, Contentstack, and Fluent Commerce to future-proof its business and boost its customer experience. The retailer gave itself two years to reinvent its e-commerce and order management strategy, which ultimately featured separate order management and e-commerce systems with microservices support, API-first, cloud-native, and headless, MACH-certified technology.

Emma selected commercetools to replace its e-commerce platform and Fluent Order Management to streamline order management to provide a single view of global inventory to fulfill orders as well as to make returns easier and more convenient for customers.

Contentstack, commercetools, and Fluent Commerce are MACH Alliance members. Their technologies combine seamlessly to create the best digital experience for their customers.

"Emma's global business is complex with different channels and more than 30 countries," noted Westendörpf. "It made sense to decouple several business domains from the commerce platform and choose connected, dedicated systems that each focus on doing one thing really well.”

Fluent Order Management plays a vital role in this new landscape. It delivers product availability, order management, global inventory, orchestration, and returns management. The OMS seamlessly integrates with commercetools' commerce platform, Contentstack's headless content management system (CMS), and ERP run through Microsoft Dynamics.

A New Architecture Built to Scale

Emma is confident its new e-commerce and order management platform can scale with the company's future growth and support its direct-to-consumer and business-to-business business models. The single inventory view helps improve customer experience by always knowing where products and orders sit from purchase to delivery.

"Emma is on a steep growth trajectory with the aim of doubling revenue every 12 [months] to 24 months," said Westendörpf. "Ensuring we build the best technology platform that enables our business to scale and stay agile is key to our success."

Partnering with Contentstack and Fluent Commerce has helped Emma with the authoring process and entry lifecycle. Contentstack's integration capabilities and superior CMS technology have alleviated some long-standing issues the retailer was facing. Ultimately, this enables Emma to introduce more markets into its business.

Partnering with technology services company Ayata, Fluent Order Management was rolled out in Columbia initially, followed by Chile and then Mexico. Emma looks to roll out the new technical architecture into additional markets over the coming months.

Nicola Kinsella is senior vice president of global marketing at Fluent Commerce, a cloud-native order and inventory management platform that lets you completely customize your business processes.