Emma, the Sleep Company, can rest easy with a composable commerce stack

Offering a good night’s sleep with patented technology is what Emma – The Sleep Company, had in mind since its inception in 2015. Founded in Frankfurt, Germany, the company has grown exponentially ever since, with the Emma Mattress, an award-winning product that provides optimal spinal alignment, no matter your sleeping position. 

Even before Emma expanded to 21 countries and arrived on Australia’s shores, the company’s in-house e-commerce platform could not keep pace with its growth trajectory, sounding the alarm for a significant change. “It became apparent that the current technical landscape would not enable us to further scale our business as quickly as we did in the past,” said Andreas Westendörpf, chief technology officer at Emma. 

Re-platforming the commerce tech stack with MACH

With the share of online sales comprising a whopping 80 per cent, Emma decided to re-platform with a new e-commerce and order management architecture, with both its new e-commerce platform and order management solution being fully MACH-certified (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless). 

“Emma’s global business is complex with different channels and more than 30 countries,” Westendörpf pointed out. “It made sense to decouple several domains of the business (AKA ‘packaged business capabilities’ – Gartner’s wording) from the commerce platform and have dedicated systems doing one thing and connecting them – the MACH approach”. 

Committed to providing comfortable shopping experiences that match its high-quality products, Emma designed a target architecture as part of the re-platforming project: The Emma Commerce Operating System (EmmaCOS). In this new ecosystem, Commercetools operates as the e-commerce backbone and Fluent Commerce’s Fluent Order Management streamlines online and offline order management, providing a single view of global inventory and the ability to fulfil and return customer orders more efficiently. 

Awakening to the possibilities of composable commerce

Emma recognised early that composable commerce is key to the tech stack of its dreams, combining best-of-breed solutions for almost all application areas, including e-commerce platforms, systems for order management (OMS), content (CMS) and warehouse management (WMS). These can all be combined flexibly using commerce APIs. The Commercetools back end can be quickly and easily adapted to Emma’s individual needs and offers the necessary space for its future company growth with unique flexibility and scalability. 

“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,” explained Westendörpf. “Commercetools is the first e-commerce 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 e-commerce platform of the future.”

The same principles applied to choosing Fluent Commerce to automate order orchestration. As Westendörpf further adds, “that is why we took the leap forward to modern commerce software development and worked with Fluent Commerce and our partners to design the e-commerce architecture of the future.” 

Making growth dreams come true 

The new tech stack has given Emma the increased confidence to boost growth with premium mattresses worldwide. With scalable, robust and flexible solutions for e-commerce and fulfillment powered by Commercetools and Fluent Commerce, Emma can now support both direct-to-consumer (D2C) and B2B business models and further expand to new countries. Today, it also makes great sleep accessible to Australians. 

“Emma is on a steep growth trajectory with the aim of doubling revenue every 12 to 24 months. Ensuring we build the best technology platform that enables our business to scale and stay agile is key to our success,” Westendörpf concluded. 

Learn more about how Emma Sleep plans to lead, disrupt and reinvent the entire sleep industry. 

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