Emma Customer Story

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

With more than 2 million mattresses sold and over 645 million Euros in sales in the year 2021, Emma The Sleep Company has become one of the fastest-growing and world-leading D2C sleep brands. Emma’s flagship product is Emma® Bed-in-a-box, which is available in over 30 countries. In 2021, Emma products were tested by several renowned institutes, resulting in more than 75 international product awards. Customers can test Emma mattresses in over 3,500 stores, plus partnerships with several retailers empower their successful D2C online strategy. In their youngest and, so far, only non-European market, China, the company grew by over 50 percent in 2021 and opened its own flagship store in Shanghai – and this is just the beginning. Hundreds of shops are expected to complement the online business there in the upcoming years.

Revenue

645 Million EUR
Markets

30
Headquaters

Frankfurt, Germany
Business Model

B2C, D2C, B2B
Worked with Partners

Commerce API

Uptime

Response time

The Challenge

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.

The Solution

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.

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.

Andreas Westendörpf

CTO, Emma

Why it was a success

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.