How the innovative D2C sleep brand Emma is building an eCommerce solution to fit their rapid business growth.

Would you buy a mattress online? In 2013, the year Emma was founded, hardly anyone thought the company's resounding success was a possibility. But the product and concept of the founders Dr. Dennis Schmoltzi and Manuel Müller have convinced more than 3 million customers to date, with a company growth of around 170% in 2020 compared to the previous year. The existing commerce system could no longer scale with Emma’s continuous rapid growth and ambitions.

A new target architecture was designed as part of a replatforming project: The Emma Commerce Operating System (EmmaCOS). The most suitable eCommerce backbone solution was sought using a proof-of-concept. commercetools was chosen as the basis for their future composable commerce architecture. The start of their cooperation began in June 2021.

Composable commerce is key for the new and best possible solution for Emma. Their new ecosystem consists of best-of-breed solutions for almost all application areas, including systems for order, content and warehouse management – in short: OMS, CMS and WMS. These can all be combined in an agile and flexible way using commerce APIs. Other features include identity and access management, a product management system (PIM), order processing and a powerful promotions engine. The commercetools backend can be quickly and easily adapted to Emma's individual needs and, with its unique flexibility and scalability, offers the necessary space for their future company growth.

After only four months of development, the first market went live in August 2021: Emma Colchón Columbia. Gradually, the tech team is working to integrate the features to extend them to all existing and future markets. In the meantime, Chile and Mexico have also gone live on the EmmaCOS.

With commercetools at the heart of the new Emma commerce solution, the company remains agile and can simultaneously grow their business in over 30 markets across a wide variety of channels. An enormous improvement and acceleration in the workflows were already observed during the introduction phase; due to the decoupling of the frontend and backend, decisions regarding the implementation of business functions are much less complicated. The teams can work on several topics at the same time and, thus, make rapid progress.