How Lush centralized global operations with composable commerce

Wanted: composable, scalable, multimarket

As Lush began as a mail-order company, the evolution to e-commerce was natural. In the early days, OpenCart powered the company’s e-commerce, but a separate instance was required for each country. This architecture of multiple monoliths meant there was little or no communication between regions. The marketing and operational challenges were bad enough, but the nail in the coffin of the system came in 2014 when a crash during a sales event led to significant revenue loss and thousands of unhappy customers.

Determined to centralize its global commerce ops, Lush replatformed to a Drupal site built in partnership with an agency. This effort enabled content sharing across regions, but it too was a complex monolith – with 20 storefronts, 20 order stores, a customer care portal, a content repo, and a stock reservation layer. The deployment process was complex, and this system also struggled to handle Lush’s ever-growing traffic:

We had the largest Drupal codebase in existence, and we pushed it to its limits – we never managed to get through a Winter Holidays sale without it crashing.

Sophia Rayne, Business Analyst at Lush

Growing tired of high maintenance costs, slow development cycles, and downtime, Lush imagined a single global digital experience that led them to a microservices approach. Doubtful any platform would be flexible and extensible enough for their cases, they began building their own e-commerce platform. Several iterations into their bespoke build, Lush realized e-commerce would ideally be delegated to a 3rd-party platform supporting multichannel architectures that were purpose-built for microservices.

Order Management

Circular packaging

Custom POS

Mobile apps

Saleor: composable, scalable, multimarket, AND tech-agnostic

Composable

By utilizing Saleor Lush freed itself from the task of building standard e-commerce 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. With Saleor handling core commerce, Lush Digital focused exclusively on areas central to its mission of bringing the in-store “oasis of kindness” experience online.

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

Lush, with its own DevOps team, initially assumed it would self-host Saleor, but the team still put Saleor Cloud through a security audit, performance test, and cost evaluation. Since the team knew they could always return to self-hosting, they decided to try out cloud benefits like SLAs, auto-scaling, managed upgrades and data replication. First in testing and later in production, Saleor Core and Saleor Cloud both proved capable of gracefully handling traffic spikes exceeding 4,000 requests per second – a scalable solution had finally been found. Three years and many billions of API requests later, Saleor Cloud keeps 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.

Having everything in one place made a huge difference. We could streamline our workflow so we had one global content team managing everything.

Sophia Rayne, Business Analyst at Lush

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 Saleor specialists are required to extend the platform.

Lush Lens

Product Kiosk

Make your own

Digital ethics at the core

Because Lush believes that digital rights are human rights, it's no surprise to find the company builds on open-source technologies by default. Lush uses its sharing of innovations that might benefit humanity – such as its palm oil-free soap base – to illustrate the importance of supporting open-source software.

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 “commerce engine,” Saleor figures prominently in Lush's digital ethics policy, which champions ethical tech that gives back to the community.

Summary

Marketing copy is full of words like composable, scalable, and multimarket; but in its replatform to Saleor, Lush leveraged each of these to its advantage. Saleor's composability saved the team from building its own e-commerce platform, freeing up countless hours for developers to put to better use. Meanwhile, Saleor Cloud proved ready for global scale, reducing stress on Lush's DevOps teams. Saleor's native multimarket support cut through layers of technical and operational complexity to unify the efforts of globally-distributed teams. And in Saleor, Lush found a technology partner whose commitment to digital ethics matched its own.