Case Emmy

First class marketplace for second hand clothing

Emmy is the largest second-hand fashion marketplace in Finland, with a mission to encourage people to partake in the circular economy and to explore reused fashion items without purchasing new ones, making it better for the environment and people involved in the production process. Emmy’s unique turnkey solution has proven successful, and the company has grown exponentially since its beginning in 2015 the Emmy brand is now well-known among fashion lovers of Finland and Estonia.

The Challenge

During 2020, it had become apparent that their digital infrastructure was no longer suitable to power Emmy’s growth and future innovation. Together with Emmy’s team, we identified key challenges in terms of sales, customer data, financial management, logistics and business reporting. We then envisioned a target state for the system architecture and development to achieve international growth targets and produced a development roadmap for Emmy.

Our Solution

We designed and developed a new marketplace ”ecosystem” using a clever combination of SaaS software and bespoke components, and integrated everything together seamlessly. The ecosystem is powered by Shopify Plus as the main ecommerce platform and extended with Algolia’s search algorithms. The user experience is developed headlessly using NextJS, and Contentful is used as the API-based content management system. All the integrations are achieved through AWS Lambdas and SNS queues, and needed external databases are in MongoDB.

We put a lot of emphasis and effort into making the site as fast as possible, and extremely SEO friendly. The site has seen its sales grow steadily after the renewal and furthermore, the new updated experience is easy to use for both fashion lovers and Emmy’s internal teams.

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