Riding the wave of success with composable commerce
diva-e develops a global e-commerce platform for Boards & More
The Boards & More Group was founded in 2000 and is the brand owner of the sports brands Fanatic, Duotone, ION and SQlab. The Boards & More Group develops and distributes products in the boarding and mountain biking sector - establishing the company as the global market leader in the kiteboarding, windsurfing and foiling sectors. Boards & More products are primarily sold via a global dealer network and D2C shops.
In order to strengthen its position as market leader in online retail, Boards & More chose diva-e as its partner for the development of a standardised and scalable platform for all B&M Group brands.
Shopify+
Storyblok
Algolia
Objective
Isolated solutions without synergy options
Boards & More's old online shop was based on a system whose further development had reached its limits in many relevant e-commerce functions and led to isolated solutions. There was a lack of a global platform for all Boards & More brands that would enable cross-selling (e.g. through a shared shopping cart) on the one hand and offer a high degree of flexibility in the customisation of the individual brand shops on the other.
Objective
A global and scalable platform
One aim of the migration project was to develop a platform that could be used globally for all Boards & More brands and create synergy effects between the brands so that growth, scaling and internationalisation would no longer be a problem.
An important factor in the strategic planning of the platform was a high degree of flexibility in the design of the individual brand shops: The design had to allow the individual presentation of each brand without losing synergy effects between the brands.
The technological framework conditions were hardly restricted in the development of the new platform - only a few of the existing systems were to remain in place and be integrated:
E-commerce: Shopify+
PIM: B&M Custom
CRM: B&M Custom
ERP: Microsoft Dynamics 365
Composable commerce for customised brand shops
The individual components and optimal technology partners for the new platform were selected using the composable commerce approach. In this development approach, the best commerce components are individually selected and combined to create a customised application for specific business requirements - this is what Boards & More looks like:
Headless Storefront: Serverless Nuxt
Templates & Components
Server API
Integration Layer
CMS: Storyblok
Pages
Experience Management
Internationalisation
Commerce: Shopify
Cart & Checkout
Product Detail Page
Product Bundles
Search & Recommendation: Algolia
Product Listing Page
Recommendations
Re-ranking
The kick-off for realisation and implementation was August 2021 and initially started with the ION and Duotone brands. The first step was to migrate the ION brand shops, which went live on the EU market just eight months after the kick-off with their IONbike and IONwater divisions in their own web design and four languages.
The next step was to internationalise the platform for other markets using a regional structure. This was followed by the launch of the ION shops in the US region via a separate Shopify system in USD.
The migration and international rollout of Duotone and the onboarding of the Fanatic brand followed on the same basis.
Result
A global platform that enables international rollouts of all brands
Thanks to the standardised technology with individual components defined using the composable commerce approach, there is now a global platform for all Boards & More brands that enables individual e-commerce appearances for each brand and serves as a global template for further rollouts, promoting synergy effects and facilitating cross-selling.
A major advantage of this standardised technology, which previously took up a lot of resources, is that systems no longer have to be programmed and maintained twice.
Following the successful go-live of the ION, Duotone and Fanatic brands, further rollouts are being planned - both in the brand structure and in the development of new regions.
No matter where the journey takes us - the new platform offers the Boards & More Group a stable basis for scaling and internationalisation plans on the wave of success.
Partner in the project
