L.L.Bean

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.”

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.”