Marimekko is a Finnish design house known worldwide for its art of printmaking – bold prints and colors bringing joy to everyday life. IONA worked with Marimekko to refresh its global ecommerce and boost scalability, enabling customers across 30 countries to enjoy the brand’s all-new digital experience across multiple channels.
We are measuring success based on customer conversion rate. We’ve been really happy with the results. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction and we’ve seen a great increase in that score, too.
The project
Wanting to improve operational efficiency, Marimekko embarked on a transformative journey to enable sustainable expansion while maintaining profitability. “We wanted to scale ecommerce business by increasing sales without increasing our operational costs, but our existing tools couldn’t support our scalability strategy," says Saija Tiitinen, Head of Digital Commerce Development at Marimekko.
To maintain its presence across multiple channels, the team at Marimekko needed to publish the same content repeatedly across different platforms. In addition, Marimekko’s previous monolithic platform couldn’t always keep up with spikes in traffic. The ecommerce renewal also presented an excellent opportunity to enhance the user experience.
To improve their scalability and innovation speed, Marimekko partnered with IONA to build a successful proof-of-concept, ‘Marimekko Studio’ using commercetools and Sanity. The success of this pilot validated the composable approach and kicked off the full renewal of Marimekko’s global ecommerce platform on the same powerful tech stack.
The new global ecommerce solution boasts composable microservices and systems. commercetools handles Marimekko’s customer, order, product and pricing information, and provides the composable architecture foundation that enables different tools to be connected together like building blocks. Sanity is a composable CMS that enables Marimekko to publish content across multiple channels at once.
Key results
The composable commerce platform separates the front-end system from the operational systems, resulting in increased site speed, improved customer experience and increased conversion rate. “We are measuring success based on customer conversion rate. We’ve been really happy with the results. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction and we’ve seen a great increase in that score too,” says Saija Tiitinen.
Content is easier to manage, publishing is more streamlined and the system can easily cope with the biggest sales peaks of the year. Most importantly, the new solution solves the core challenge of scalability by allowing content to be more efficiently published across multiple channels and markets while giving the company flexibility to respond to changes in customer behaviour.
The partnership set the stage for the future. “We didn’t create a composable commerce solution to only serve the online store – it’s just a starting point. In the future, we want to use the same content for our B2B digital showroom, email campaigns, SMS marketing and other platforms,” says Saija Tiitinen.
IONA and Marimekko continue to work together to expand the use of composable commerce, for example creating new tools for Marimekko’s B2B business. “We are moving forward with IONA to create a digital showroom and lookbook for our wholesale customers, creating a more inspiring experience,” says Saija Tiitinen.
Highlights
Increased performance
Composable commerce separates the front-end from the operational systems, increasing site speed and ensuring smooth operation even during spikes in demand.
Streamlined production
Marimekko's internal user experience for content editors and developers has been significantly enhanced by the adoption of best-of-breed technologies, such as Sanity CMS.
Improved, mobile-first user experience
An overhaul of search functionality, product listing page, product detail page, shopping cart and checkout design elevates the customer shopping experience to a whole new level.
Increased conversion
Frictionless, highly personalised and AI-powered customer experience results in higher conversion rates.
Record NPS in the US
Following the launch of its new ecommerce platform, first in the US market, Marimekko saw promising results in customer satisfaction, achieving a record Net Promoter Score in the US.
Future-proof architecture
The truly composable commerce architecture sets Marimekko up for the future with its flexibility and infinite scalability to adapt to changing customer needs.