Scaling globally with composable commerce

For Marimekko, scaling up its business – especially in international market – has been a cornerstone of its strategy. Wanting to improve operational efficiency, Marimekko embarked on a transformative journey to rethink its approach, enabling sustainable expansion while maintaining profitability. “We wanted to scale ecommerce business by increasing sales without increasing our operational costs, but our existing tools couldn’t support our scalability strategy”, says Saija Tiitinen, Head of Digital Commerce Development at Marimekko.

Wanting to improve content creation, scalability and innovation speed, the Marimekko team started exploring composable commerce. Marimekko worked with IONA to build a proof-of-concept (POC) to pilot a composable tech stack as a potential solution for its global ecommerce renewal.

The POC, ‘Marimekko Studio,’ was a virtual creative hub that allowed fans and customers to express their creativity by personalising items with Marimekko’s signature letters, prints, and colors. The concept was piloted in 2023, using commercetools and Sanity. Once the POC proved successful, IONA started renewing Marimekko’s global ecommerce using the same tech stack.

Based on user feedback and data from the then-current Marimekko global ecommerce, key areas for improving the user experience were identified, particularly the search functionality, product detail page (PDP), product listing page (PLP), and cart and checkout processes. Leveraging Marimekko’s strong brand equity and solid digital design language, the renewal aimed to enhance the design and user experience incrementally rather than radically – ensuring a seamless transition that would not surprise customers upon launch.

In addition to customer experience, two other key areas of improvement for user experience were identified, highlighting the critical roles of two internal user groups: content editors and marketers, and developers. For non-technical content editors and marketers, the renewed platform allows them to create, publish, schedule and modify pages with ease. Content editors can incorporate SEO into their workflow, and the local teams are able to customise the site to suit their target audiences’ specific needs. For developers, a component-driven user interface supports front-end flexibility and scalability. The new development and design practice utilises standardised, modular components as interchangeable building blocks of the UI throughout the ecommerce.

During the design process, IONA also redesigned Marimekko’s Figma master file and UI component library, updating everything from buttons to layout blocks. The redesign preserved the best elements of the old system while introducing new components. These updated components leverage Figma’s latest features, such as variables and auto layouts, to enhance digital design workflows.

Simultaneously, IONA built the component library in code and documented it using Storybook. The UI components in Figma are closely aligned with their code counterparts, with similar naming and structure and automated pipeline that generates code directly from Figma assets. This ensures consistency between visual UI designs and implemented components online. This foundation has since been expanded and utilised for other digital channel related design projects at Marimekko.

At the heart of Marimekko lie its iconic, bold prints in vibrant colors. Building on this foundation, Marimekko offers in its ecommerce store a diverse range of products across four main categories: Clothing, Bags, Accessories, and Home. These products cater to a wide variety of customer groups and buyer profiles, making it essential for the ecommerce platform to meet their unique needs. To achieve this, representatives from these groups were actively involved in the design process, providing invaluable feedback on the proposed user experience.

During the design phases of both the POC (Marimekko Studio) and the subsequent global ecommerce renewal, user validation rounds were organised to refine the experience. For the global ecommerce renewal, 14 user representatives from multiple countries were interviewed. This approach ensured broad representation of the main target groups (approximately five representatives from each group) in Finland and internationally. The testing focused on product discovery and purchase journeys, particularly assessing the effectiveness of product detail pages across various product categories.

The user validations proved invaluable – not only for improving small but critical UX details, such as size selection on product detail pages, but also for gaining insights into effective imagery, enhancing loyalty program messaging, and understanding how perceptions of Marimekko differ internationally compared to its home country of Finland.

The new global ecommerce solution boasts composable microservices and systems, including commercetools, Sanity, Adyen, Avalara and an AI-powered personalisation service, enabling flexibility and scalability for the brand. commercetools handles Marimekko’s customer, order, product and pricing information. commercetools provides the composable architecture foundation that enables different tools to be connected together like building blocks. Sanity is a composable CMS that enables Marimekko to publish content across multiple channels at once.

“We didn’t create a composable commerce solution to only serve the online store – it’s just a starting point. In the future, we want to use the same content for our B2B digital showroom, email campaigns, SMS marketing and other platforms”, says Saija Tiitinen.

The composable commerce platform separates the front-end system from the operational systems, resulting in increased site speed, improved customer experience and increased conversion rate. “We are measuring success based on customer conversation rate. We’ve been really happy with the results. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction, and we’ve seen a great increase in that score too”, says Saija Tiitinen.

Content is easier to manage, publishing is more streamlined, and the system can easily cope with the biggest sales peaks of the year. “After 1 month of launching the remaining markets, we had our biggest sales event of the year. A large volume of customers visited the site simultaneously, and the site was functioning without any hiccups. That’s something we don’t take for granted”.

Most importantly, the new solution solves the core challenge of scalability by allowing content to be more efficiently published across multiple channels and markets while giving the company flexibility to respond to changes in customer behaviour. “Traditional ecommerce websites may be less important in the future. The new generation is more engaged with social commerce. If you want to be customer-centric, you need to know the thing you have now won’t be what you need in 5 years. You must be humble enough to say, ‘we don’t know,’ and you must build things to be flexible and adaptable”, says Jarno Kartela, Digital Director at Marimekko.

The truly composable commerce platform not only improves the overall shopping experience for Marimekko’s customers, but also vastly improves the user experience internally. Content editors and developers enjoy the scalability, usability and efficiency of the new ecommerce platform.

IONA and Marimekko continue to work together to expand the use of composable commerce, for example creating new tools for Marimekko’s B2B business. “We are moving forward with IONA to create a digital showroom and lookbook for our wholesale customers, creating a more inspiring experience”, says Saija Tiitinen.