When Dr. Dennis Schmoltzi and Manuel Mueller established Emma – The Sleep Company in 2013, no one would have expected this newcomer to turn the mattress industry upside down so quickly, as well as persuade customers to buy their mattress online. What led to their staggering success? Ultimately, it was the combination of revolutionizing the industry with an excellent product and their extraordinary organizational structure. But to manage their rapid pace, Emma still needed a commerce system that could keep up. The solution: commercetools and implementing other principles from the MACH Alliance.
The company's flagship product is the Emma® Bed-in-a-Box, which is available in over 30 countries and has received more than 40 product awards. Over 700 employees work to draft, develop and implement innovations as quickly as possible – from the global supply chain to marketing and sales. This successful D2C online strategy has expanded to include partnerships with several retailers, so that Emma can be tested in more than 3,000 stores. The result: annual sales of 405 million EUR in 2020 – a growth rate of 170% compared to the previous year – as well as office locations in Frankfurt (Germany), Manila (Philippines), Lisbon (Portugal) and Shanghai (China). With the company’s rapid growth, it quickly became clear that the existing commerce system would not be able to keep up.
As part of a replatforming project, the Emma team conceptualized the desired architecture and used proof-of-concept (POC) tests to find the most suitable solution. After a comprehensive evaluation of the eCommerce backbone solutions available in the market, Emma selected commercetools as one of the cornerstones of its future composable eCommerce architecture. The collaboration began in June 2021, and the first store was set up on it as early as August: Emma Colchón Colombia. Now, the tech team is working on gradually integrating the functions and expanding them to all existing and future markets.
Step-by-step to the new solution
The ecosystem of applications and services built up by the members of the MACH Alliance (i.e. systems for order, content and warehouse management, in short: OMS, CMS and WMS) offers Emma the necessary flexibility and scalability. This is especially true with regard to the eCommerce applications, as the combination of the MACH partner solutions is particularly developer-friendly and yet not self-contained. It enables the rapid integration of business applications – based on modern and professional standards for high-quality software engineering.
Andreas Westendörpf, CTO at Emma – The Sleep Company, explains the success of the young collaboration:
In this partnership, we share a high degree of strategic principles and practices in software engineering to maintain the highest level of agility in our fast-growing business. commercetools is the first eCommerce platform that was designed to be headless and cloud-native from the start and that has excellent developer tooling at its disposal. We are pleased to have found the perfect partner for Emma's eCommerce platform of the future.
CTO, Emma - The Sleep Company
In the second part of our blog series about Emma, we asked Andreas Westendörpf, CTO at Emma, three questions. Read on to discover how the new tech stack not only enables the company’s growth, but also improves teamwork.