L.L.Bean

The challenge: Evolving a century-old D2C vision for the digital era

L.L.Bean has always been a direct-to-consumer pioneer, grounded in a mission to deliver purposeful, high-quality products for those who love the outdoors. Known for its customer-centric ethos — also known as “L.L.’s Golden Rule” — the brand built its foundation on catalog sales and call centers at first. In the mid-1990s, the brand was among the first retailers to launch an eCommerce site powered by IBM Websphere (later HCL Commerce). 

Over the past 30 years, L.L.Bean’s digital channel has grown into its most significant revenue driver, generating over $1 billion USD annually in online sales and serving over 5.5 million digital customers. 

The company has embraced every wave of eCommerce innovation, from catalog-centric orders to sophisticated mobile apps. Prompted by customer expectations and the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, L.L.Bean started offering omnichannel features, such as BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store). However, with the brand’s need to innovate constantly, the original eCommerce platform started to show its cracks, as it became increasingly difficult to scale and release new capabilities.

While the retailer started to modernize by adopting the headless model at first, initially implemented in the frontend, the legacy core commerce remained a bottleneck. 

“We knew we needed to move to shared services to support all our channels — website, call center and stores — to offer a consistent customer experience,” said JJ Rouhana, Chief Information Officer at L.L.Bean. “We had multiple codebases for our frontend and we wanted to simplify that. The headless environment set the stage for us as part of a larger digital transformation project.”    

For L.L.Bean, the goals were clear: 

• Modernize its architecture to keep pace with customer expectations. 
• Unwind decades of custom-built functionality that had become difficult to maintain.
• Migrate millions of customer accounts, product catalog and data assets without disruption to its main sales channel: eCommerce. 
• And ultimately, future-proof its commerce foundation to support seamless omnichannel experiences.

As L.L.Bean moved closer to full composable commerce adoption, the stakes were high. “eCommerce is our largest channel,” mentioned JJ Rouhana. “We needed a platform that would allow us to simplify, scale and innovate, all without risking the loyalty and experience of our customers during or after the migration.”

What I love about eCommerce is that it’s never static; customer expectations are always evolving. That’s what makes introducing new capabilities so exciting. To keep up, flexibility is essential and that’s exactly what commercetools delivers. Its composable architecture gives us the agility to adapt quickly, both during and after implementation, helping us stay ahead of the competition.

JJ Rouhana

CIO, L.L.Bean

The solution: Strategic migration to unlock speed and innovation

In 2019, L.L.Bean initiated a search for a modern replacement for its 25+ year-old IBM Websphere eCommerce platform, which had reached end-of-life and could no longer meet the company’s evolving business needs. After a thorough RFP process and market evaluation, commercetools was selected for its MACH®-based, composable architecture and ability to support continuous optimization. Encora was chosen as the system integration (SI) partner, bringing experience in scalable eCommerce implementations. 

The project officially launched in April 2022. “We had a very methodical, intentional rollout plan,” said Sundar Sivashunmugam, Enterprise Architect at L.L.Bean. “I know there are projects that can be done pretty fast, but L.L.Bean.com is our core revenue generator. We don’t want to rush through the migration process. We need to get this right.” 

L.L.Bean avoided a risky “big bang” cutover, opting instead for a multi-phase rollout, starting with the checkout process. By migrating in phases, the company significantly reduced risk while tackling the most complex and crucial part of the customer journey. Meticulous monitoring of customer interactions throughout the transition was crucial to problem-solving issues once they arose, making sure disruptions were minimal to the customer experience. 

The migration plan was structured in three phases:  

• Release 1 – Checkout – Guest User: The initial release focused on migrating guest checkout functionality. commercetools’ flexibility enabled L.L.Bean to isolate just the components needed for cart and checkout, supporting a faster path to value. The release was completed ahead of the 2023 peak season, with commercetools handling over 50% of peak orders without disruption.
• Release 2 – Checkout – Registered User (migrated, segmented, activated): In this phase, all legacy web accounts were migrated to the new commercetools platform through a one-time batch load, followed by real-time synchronization to ensure a seamless customer experience. 
• To enhance security, customers were prompted to reset their passwords with stronger requirements before accessing their accounts on the new platform. Once a password was set, accounts were activated and key data, like shopping carts and wish lists, was migrated in real time. From that point on, the legacy platform was no longer accessible, ensuring a smooth and secure transition without disruption to the customer journey.
• Release 3 – Web Catalog, Content, Browse & Search: The final release covered core storefront functionality, including the migration of search, navigation, content and product pages. All 250,000 SKUs were integrated into commercetools. In addition, it included all the backend tooling. The company also migrated its homegrown merchandising tools to commercetools’ no-code admin tool, the Merchant Center. 

The program involved a collaborative team of around 50 people spanning L.L.Bean, Encora and commercetools. This cross-functional effort enabled the replatforming to move forward at speed and scale without compromising quality.

Throughout all phases, L.L.Bean used feature toggling and traffic ramp-up strategies, gradually scaling based on monitoring insights. “For each release, we launched with 0% of traffic to the new functionality, starting with internal testing in production. From there, we gradually ramped up — 1%, 5%, 10%, 25% and so on — over two months, depending on the release. This phased approach worked beautifully for us,” revealed JJ Rouhana. “As a result, we finished on time, on budget, with zero outages and successfully migrated 5.5 million customers in a carefully executed project.” 

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The result: Enterprise-scale for L.L.Bean’s most successful peak season yet 

More than a technical achievement, the migration to commercetools fundamentally transformed how L.L.Bean delivers value to customers. Now, commercetools powers L.L.Bean’s carts, orders and web hierarchy, unified in a platform that enables frictionless omnichannel experiences. Even during the 28-month transition period, the retailer launched over 100 enhancements, which translated into more than $10 million USD in incremental revenue. 

The full migration was completed on time in May/June 2024, allowing the company to prepare ahead of the peak season of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. “Our first holiday season was fully on the commercetools platform and we had zero unplanned outages. The platform scaled and kept at high performance,” shared JJ Rouhana. “On Cyber Monday, our biggest day of the year, we processed over five orders per second during the peak hour between 9 and 10 pm.” As a result, the 2024 holiday season was one of the strongest in L.L.Bean’s history. “We had a website that was available 100% of the time and met the needs of our customers.”

In addition to the seamlessness of the migration and the ability to scale in real-time, simplification was a critical success factor. “We had over 25 years of customizations on the previous platform, so we needed to simplify the capabilities to take advantage of what came out of the box with commercetools,” said JJ.  

As part of this transformation, L.L.Bean undertook significant platform and catalog cleanup:

• Reduced its footprint from 8 to 3 environments.
• Deployed over 50 microservices and 400+ cloud functions across environments. 
• Customizations are stored in L.L.Bean’s own cloud for independent scaling. 
• Migrated and rationalized 250,000 SKUs. 
• Removed 18,000+ obsolete product pages.

Thanks to commercetools, the retailer was able to sunset an outdated batch-driven architecture and embrace an event-driven model for automated product launches and business workflows. This model also enabled L.L.Bean to take a security-first approach by enforcing authenticated, auditable access across systems. 

More importantly, L.L.Bean can now focus on continuous innovation that positively impacts customer experiences and, as a result, the company’s bottom line. “We went from an SUV to a Ferrari,” concluded JJ Rouhana. “That’s exactly what commercetools gave us.”

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