Driving organic growth through close relationships with customers, particularly professional painters, is a top priority for Flügger. The company started by building a digital ecosystem to elevate customer experiences across B2C and B2B business models. Furthermore, Flügger envisioned creating multiple brands to serve distinct markets or offer specific products.
However, their legacy monolithic commerce system, built on Episerver (now Optimizely), couldn’t keep pace with the company’s growth. The compounding increase of technical complexity that came with adding new functionality demanded excessive resources — time, money and effort — to scale, while fragile point-to-point integrations, especially with an aging ERP, caused performance issues across both B2B and B2C channels.
In addition to limited scalability, the tightly coupled architecture also imposed constraints on innovation and speed to market. More importantly, due to the rigid architecture, new features with point-to-point integrations to their ERP would face additional strain, affecting eCommerce sites and brick-and-mortar stores, as their POS (point-of-sale) systems would become unresponsive under pressure.
High-traffic events, such as Black Friday, would also put a strain on the entire system. “Due to our tightly coupled architecture, sharing resources was a real problem. Scaling would also incur additional cost as we would scale the whole platform, even though it wasn’t needed. We couldn’t target specific components for scaling if needed — it was all or nothing,” said Mathias Schnack, Head of Architecture and Development at Flügger.
When Flügger decided to test the waters of a new D2C brand targeting younger consumers, “we saw it as the moment to break free from the legacy platform and embrace modern technology,” said Mathias.
To provide customers with elevated experiences while streamlining its technology, Flügger’s search for a commerce vendor followed a development philosophy that isolates concerns and improves reusability across systems.
These principles aligned perfectly with composable commerce, powered by MACH® (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless), which provides a modern approach to building flexible, scalable and agile software systems. As Mathias explained, “We’ve gone to a very modern approach to platform architecture.”
De-risking this transition was crucial for Flügger, so the launch of Notes of Colour, a new D2C brand, was the ideal testbed for a composable approach. Working in tandem with partner Novicell, a system integrator with extensive experience in composable-based projects, Flügger built and launched the new brand’s eCommerce using commercetools in only three months.
Initially, the launch revealed an unexpected challenge: The site was performing so quickly that some interactions felt almost unnatural to customers. “Adding products to the basket, navigating the site, checking out — everything happened instantly,” said Mathias. “We actually introduced brief, intentional delays to make the experience feel more familiar.”
With that “good problem to have” fixed, the successful rollout set the stage for a company-wide transition to composable technology. “We started small with something new that made it easy to take risks,” explained Mathias. “Then we began rolling out other Flügger’s websites with commercetools.”
Building on the existing foundation from the D2C brand, the eCommerce migration for B2C-focused websites took approximately a year, primarily due to the frontend design and the integration of the company’s PIM (Product Information Management) solution with commercetools. This enabled Flügger to move away from its rigid monolith and point-to-point integrations, which were expensive to maintain and hard to scale.
Additionally, because commercetools handles maintenance, Black Friday is no longer an operational headache. “We can now focus on creating great content and marketing campaigns for Black Friday-like events, instead of worrying about whether our systems can cope with the demand,” said Mathias.
Moreover, the reusability of components is Flügger’s answer to streamlining operations and scaling efficiencies, so much so that the company leverages composable components across multiple channels, like POS (point-of-sale) systems. The flexibility of composable also allows developers to strike a balance between buying off-the-shelf components and building custom solutions where it matters.
As a result, the company has more freedom and flexibility to create experiences that resonate with customers. The same can be said for working with AI: The company can create new solutions leveraging AI faster, as they’re just a “small integration away.”
With commercetools, Flügger successfully rolled out the new platform across Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Poland, with France and Germany being the next markets.
We don’t have to worry about large-scale events anymore or daily maintenance. commercetools just works. The flexibility and reliability enable us to create solutions unique to our business needs. This convinced the entire organization to adopt a more composable way of thinking across other systems and projects. It changed how we build, scale and operate.
Head of Architecture and Development, Flügger group A/S
Flügger’s shift to a composable commerce architecture has delivered measurable success. The B2C eCommerce migration saw an immediate increase in conversion rates of over 500%, aligning with industry benchmarks. The new fast and responsive SPA (single page application) has also driven significant improvements in SEO performance and visibility in AI-driven search results.
With an enterprise-grade platform that’s both reliable and scalable, the team can now effortlessly manage high-traffic events like Black Friday — and confidently handle the growing traffic demands of the future — with a small team.
Beyond operational efficiency, the move to commercetools and a new architecture has improved development velocity and lowered the cost and effort of scaling new experiences across channels. By reusing components, Flügger has reduced the investment needed to build other systems. “By continuously adding to our online platform through big and small projects, be it new off-the-shelf components or microservices, we are adding functionality to our portfolio that we can leverage in new solutions,” said Mathias.
While composable commerce may come with higher upfront costs, Flügger sees a clear long-term payoff, especially as the same stack supports multiple brands and sales channels. Maintenance, scaling and upgrades are predictable and aligned with specific business cases. As Mathias pointed out, “When you reuse components throughout multiple brands, TCO (total costs of ownership) goes down.”
More than operational efficiency and lower costs, Flügger now has the flexibility to rapidly integrate emerging technologies, like generative AI. When Flügger gained early access to OpenAI via Azure, the team quickly built and launched over 20,000 dynamically AI-generated landing pages across their websites in just weeks, using color tint data from their lab systems.
With a DevOps-oriented culture and composable stack, the engineering team is now focused on innovation rather than maintenance. Their efforts focus on optimizing the customer experience, testing new features and accelerating time-to-market.
Looking ahead, Flügger is applying the same architectural model to rebuild its fulfillment and last-mile logistics operations. The goal is to tailor order processing, click-and-collect and tracking around Flügger’s specific business needs — again reusing components from commercetools and its own portfolio of microservices developed in-house. The same principle applies to its B2B commerce plans.
“commercetools provides support for many use cases. We follow our architectural principles and learnings from the past. We don’t build Swiss Army knives; we implement chainsaws. commercetools handles our orders and provides the frontends with product data and is extremely proficient and reliable,” concluded Mathias.
