How Lush centralized global operations with composable commerce

Wanted: Composable, Scalable, Multimarket

Lush’s journey from mail-order beginnings to ecommerce pioneer was a natural evolution. In the early days, OpenCart powered its online operations — but each country required a separate instance. This architecture of multiple monoliths meant little to no communication between regions. Marketing and operations were fragmented, and in 2014, a crash during a major sales event became the breaking point — causing significant revenue loss and thousands of disappointed customers.

Determined to centralize global commerce operations, Lush replatformed to a custom Drupal solution built with an external agency. The new setup allowed content sharing across regions, but it remained a heavy monolith: 20 storefronts, 20 order stores, a customer care portal, a content repository, and a stock reservation layer. Deployments were complex, and the system still struggled to handle Lush’s growing global traffic.

Tired of high maintenance costs, slow development cycles, and recurring downtime, Lush set out to imagine a single, global digital experience — one that could finally scale with its ambitions. This vision led the team toward a microservices architecture.

Skeptical that any existing platform could offer the flexibility and extensibility they needed, Lush began developing its own ecommerce system in-house. But several iterations later, it became clear that commerce was best handled by a specialized, third-party platform — one designed from the ground up to support microservices and multichannel experiences.

Order Management

Circular packaging

Custom POS

Mobile apps

Saleor: composable, scalable, & multimarket

Composable

By utilizing Saleor Lush freed itself from the task of building standard ecommerce features while still preserving the flexibility and extensibility it needed. Saleor’s API-first architecture eased integration with Lush’s mission-critical microservices, the POS system, and native apps. By making Saleor the heart of its commerce operations, Lush Digital focused entirely on translating its in-store “oasis of kindness” into a seamless online experience.

“

We're enjoying the modularity and flexibility we can harness from Saleor to deliver on our promise of the best, freshest, handmade cosmetics.

Adam Goswell, Tech R&D at Lush

Scaling with Saleor Cloud

With its own DevOps team, Lush initially planned to self-host Saleor. Still, the team put Saleor Cloud through a full security audit, performance test, and cost evaluation. Confident they could always return to self-hosting if needed, Lush decided to trial the advantages of the managed service — SLAs, auto-scaling, managed upgrades, and built-in data replication.

In testing and later in production, both Saleor Core and Saleor Cloud consistently handled traffic spikes exceeding 4,000 requests per second. Three years and billions of API requests later, Saleor Cloud continues to keep Lush reliable, performant, and secure.

Multimarket

Given the poor UX and rigidity of most enterprise dashboards, Lush expected a custom dashboard would be needed for the ecommerce team. Instead, the marketing and operations teams found within Saleor a commerce-ready, user-friendly, and extensible dashboard out-of-the-box. Today, Lush uses a single Saleor dashboard to manage its global commerce operation.

Past efforts at centralization had led to inflexible monoliths. With Saleor, Lush finally had the best of both worlds: The engineering team established a technical foundation that was composable, extensible, and flexible enough to handle multimarket commerce — and the business unit centralized the work of its globally-distributed teams.

The ability to control almost everything — products, variants, shipping rates and zones, gift cards, user permissions, and more — at the channel level finally tamed the multimarket complexity Lush had been fighting for years. Breaking down information silos across Lush's regions, Saleor channels made notable improvements to the shopping experience and to CX.

Tech-agnostic and API-only

Saleor functionality is extended exclusively through its GraphQL API and synchronous webhooks. Unlike plugin-based platforms, which require developers to use the same language and stack as the platform, Saleor is tech-agnostic. No proprietary standards or knowledge is required to extend Saleor platform. Your team can use the stack they already know weather this is TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Go, or something else.

Lush Lens

Product Kiosk

Make your own

Digital ethics at the core

For Lush, digital rights are human rights. It’s no surprise, then, that the company builds on open-source technologies by default. Just as Lush openly shares innovations like its palm oil–free soap base to benefit others, it extends that same philosophy to the digital world — supporting open-source software that advances ethical technology.

“

We decided to use Saleor for our commerce engine as we want to help smaller tech companies representing the open source movement to gain momentum and be able to fight back against the large tech conglomerates that dominated and saturated the commerce market.

Jack Constantine, Chief Digital Officer at Lush

As the core commerce engine, Saleor plays a central role in Lush’s digital ethics policy — powering a global business while embodying the company’s commitment to openness and community-driven innovation.

Summary

Marketing is full of buzzwords like composable, scalable, and multimarket — but in its replatform to Saleor, Lush put each of these principles into real practice and lavereaged them into their advantage.

Saleor’s composability spared the team from building a bespoke ecommerce platform, freeing countless developer hours for innovation. Saleor Cloud delivered effortless global scale, easing the load on Lush’s DevOps teams. And with native multimarket support, Lush streamlined technical and operational complexity, uniting globally distributed teams under a single, flexible architecture.

In Saleor, Lush found more than a platform — it found a partner whose commitment to open source and digital ethics mirrors its own.