Celigo speeds up Asambeauty’s migration to a composable commerce architecture

About

Asambeauty is a German cosmetics company based in Unterföhring, near Munich. Founded by the Asam family in 1963, the company has a rich heritage in cosmetics innovation. From its inception, Asambeauty has been committed to developing and producing its own recipes in-house, collaborating with renowned dermatologists, scientists, and chemists to innovate, research, and continuously utilize new ingredients.

The company’s growth strategy has been multi-faceted, leveraging home shopping channels, ecommerce, and retail partnerships to reach a broad customer base. In recent years, Asambeauty has expanded its portfolio to include four brands covering skincare, body care, hair care, color cosmetics, and fragrance.

This comprehensive beauty experience is now available through their online platform and in retail stores across Germany, Austria, and other countries. The company also has a strong international presence, operating in 49 countries worldwide.

The challenge

In 2022, Dr. Thomas Feuring joined Asambeauty as their CTO, in the wake of the company’s explosive ecommerce growth following the COVID-19 pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the company relied primarily on retail chains and home shopping networks. However, the post-pandemic shift saw ecommerce accounting for over 40 percent of global sales.

While this shift represented an immense opportunity, Asambeauty’s existing IT infrastructure hindered growth. The company used direct database integrations to mediate information between its different systems, and its Magento-based storefront was tightly coupled to its ERP, making it challenging to scale or introduce new features. Integrating new third-party logistics providers (3PLs), adding sales channels, or expanding into new regions became a slow and resource-heavy process.

This tightly coupled architecture led to significant operational friction. For example, customer data synchronization between the ecommerce storefront and the ERP was limited to order-related transactions. If a customer updated their shipping address but didn’t place an order, the new data wouldn’t reflect in the ERP, creating incomplete records across systems. Another drawback of this architecture was inefficient data sharing with 3PLs. Data from logistics partners’ warehouses would not continuously sync with the storefront, leading the company to send orders for fulfilment to warehouses where products were not available, which delayed shipping times and impacted the customer experience.

Dr. Feuring, with his experience leading IT transformations at MyToys Otto Group and Thalia, recognized that Asambeauty needed a more modular and scalable architecture. His vision was to shift the company to a composable commerce architecture, where individual systems could be decoupled and integrated through a centralized layer. This approach would allow the business to scale rapidly, with less complexity and improved system efficiency.

The solution

Dr. Feuring championed the move toward a composable architecture. A critical component of this new approach was the need for a robust integration layer to serve as the connective tissue between various systems. Asambeauty opted for Shopware as its headless storefront platform and Celigo as its integration platform.

“We needed a system that would serve as the integration layer at the center of our new IT architecture,” Dr. Feuring said. “Consulting with Basecom, they shared their great experience using Celigo in previous projects and their observations on how it stacked up to the competition. After testing the platform a little ourselves, and seeing how robust and intuitive it was to work with, Celigo was an easy choice.”

Key architectural changes:

• Decoupling systems with a headless commerce approach: Asambeauty transitioned from a monolithic Magento-based structure to a headless commerce architecture using Shopware as its storefront. This separation allows front-end development to move independently of backend processes, increasing agility and enabling faster feature deployment.
• Centralized integration: Celigo serves as the integration layer that connects all of Asambeauty’s systems, including ERPs (Navision, Microsoft Business Central, and Infor), PIM (Akeneo), CMS (Contentful), marketing tools like Bloomreach, data warehouse (BigQuery), and a network of 3PLs. This decoupling enables systems to communicate seamlessly, ensuring consistency in data and operations across the business.
• API-driven communication: Celigo’s API-first approach provides dynamic connectivity between Asambeauty’s different systems, enabling real-time data transfer and ensuring all platforms (ecommerce, ERP, 3PL, and more) are always in sync. This allows the company to quickly integrate new partners, systems, and regions without having to rework core functionality.

Technical enhancements:

• Real-time inventory and fulfillment optimization: Celigo enables real-time communication between Asambeauty’s storefront and its network of 3PLs, allowing Asambeauty to make instantaneous decisions on order routing based on current stock levels and warehouse proximity. This can significantly reduce order processing times and improve shipping time estimates.
• Enhanced customer data: By leveraging Celigo to push data from customer-facing tools (e.g., Bloomreach, Zendesk) into BigQuery, Asambeauty can overcome the limitations of individual systems. For example, Bloomreach’s four-week data retention can be extended indefinitely by pushing customer data to a data warehouse or data lake via Celigo, allowing Asambeauty to build more comprehensive customer profiles for dynamic merchandising, pricing, and personalized marketing efforts.
• Modular scalability: The decoupling of systems allows Asambeauty to integrate or swap out components without impacting other systems, reducing the risk of downtime. For example, seeing how easy it was to use Celigo to roll out integrations, Asambeauty decided to connect Zendesk immediately with their current Magento setup without bogging down development pipelines in preparation for its migration to Shopware.
• Error handling and monitoring: Using Celigo’s built-in error management tools makes it easy to identify and auto-resolve run-time errors in integration flows. These are extended, through integrations with monitoring tools like Datadog, increasing Asambeauty’s operational resilience, as issues can be flagged and resolved before causing major disruptions.

The bottom line

The implementation of the composable architecture, with Celigo at its core, has delivered several key benefits to Asambeauty:

• Faster rollout of new features: The flexibility of the architecture allows for faster integration of logistics partners, new sales channels, and additional regions.
• Optimized data flow and customer experience: Real-time inventory and shipping information allows Asambeauty to offer a seamless customer experience, with accurate delivery estimates at the point-of-sale, and more personalized product discovery and buyer journeys.
• Scalability for future growth: The new architecture is designed to scale with the business, supporting Asambeauty’s goals of an ongoing 15 percent cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR). The company can seamlessly expand to new markets and optimize its supply chain without operational bottlenecks.

This transformation positions Asambeauty for long-term success in the rapidly evolving world of ecommerce, showcasing the transformative power of modern architectures supported by integration platforms like Celigo — helping businesses adapt and thrive in dynamic market conditions.

Dr. Feuring summarized the impact: “Celigo enables us to quickly integrate new tools, manage data flows seamlessly, and scale our operations without friction. This flexibility is crucial for our growth.”