How the sustainable fashion label puts sustainability on the map with Shopware 6
The ARMEDANGELS brand is one of Europe’s largest eco & fair fashion labels today. A team of nearly 100 employees ensures that their sustainable fashion delights customers via their successful Shopware 6 online shop as well as their 900 brick-and-mortar stores of various retail partners across Europe. But what led to this success story?
Sustainability is not just a trend, it’s a way of life – particularly for the founders of the fashion label ARMEDANGELS. That’s proven by the fact that all the way back in 2007, Martin Höfeler and Anton Jurina made their decision to distinguish themselves from the existing fashion industry and set a new standard with their fair production and ecological materials. Moving away from fast fashion, substandard working conditions in production facilities and moving towards timeless design, sustainable and regenerative materials, fair working conditions as well as fair pay. The label was awarded the Fairtrade and GOTS certificate and is now also a member of the Fair Wear Foundation.
Headless and API-first approach persuaded ARMEDANGELS
When it was time to update their online shop, the Cologne-based company wanted innovation and decided to switch from Magento to Shopware. “We wanted a new, modern system that’s quick and can make mobile shopping even easier in the future by using PWA and that also offers us enough flexibility and simplicity for our content creation”, is how Matthias Wirtz, Head of IT at ARMEDANGELS, explains their decision to go with Shopware 6. This version perfectly meets the requirements. After all, it offers the perfect foundation for headless ecommerce, and the new experience worlds enable cross-channel shopping experiences to be created easily without any prior technical knowledge.
The fashion company often faced challenges with their previous shop system Magento: The provider terminated its support for the installed version of Magento 1 and the system could no longer handle the increase in mobile traffic.
Migration from Magento to Shopware in just six months
The Shopware agency dasistweb supported ARMEDANGELS in making the switch. The relaunch only took six months. The result was a live worldwide online shop built with Shopware 6. “Through our collaboration with ARMEDANGELS, the concept for the new shop emerged”, says Martin Weinmayr, CEO of dasistweb, reflecting on the project.
“A type of ‘agile waterfall project’ made the concept and implementation phases align. This way, finalised concept areas were already realised, while concepts for additional features were still being fine-tuned. This allowed ARMEDANGELS to get started with content maintenance early on and helped both optimise and reduce the project duration, among other things”, Weinmayr continues.
Shopware experience worlds: Quick and easy content output saves lots of time
Within a short period of time, the ARMEDANGELS ecommerce team was able to recognise direct benefits as a result of the relaunch. “We benefit from quicker loading times and a much faster and easier landing page generation without the need for developers. Shopware’s experience worlds save our team a considerable amount of time”, says Kruse.
10% increase in revenue and conversion rate thanks to Shopware
The automated interconnection between Shopware and ERP makes things a lot easier: now the return process takes place automatically, whilst observing any discount codes that were applied. Improved KPIs are also proof that migrating was the right decision: using Shopware has increased sales and (mobile) conversion by a good 10%.
Summary and prospects: Online shop to become even more international
“We’re excited about the great teamwork with dasistweb and Shopware which created an absolutely smooth project that we also plan to drive forward in the future. Our plan is to leverage country-specific stores, customised currencies and new languages to strengthen our internationalisation”, says Kruse, looking forward. With its multi-currency, multi-language and configurable tax calculation features, Shopware 6 provides ARMEDANGELS with the ideal conditions to once again make this plan a reality. Martin Weinmayr views the project as extremely positive as well: “Overall, we are very proud of what we have accomplished together. We look forward to a continued collaboration to optimise and develop the platform month by month – true to our motto THINK – CONCEPT – CODE – DEPLOY – MEASURE – REPEAT“.
