Stronger – Tech‑enabled hypergrowth

Launching the brand

STRONGER is one of the brightest shining stars on the European DTC scene, growing fast since day one while being profitable. Starting out by printing patterns on t‑shirts in a small shop in Stockholm, co‑founders Juri, Joel and Henrik quickly identified a new opportunity for a DTC business. The t‑shirt printing business had taught them how to rapidly take new designs from idea to reality and what technology was needed to drive sales. Fully financed by its own generated cash flow, Stronger has grown to become a Direct‑to‑Consumer powerhouse. Growing from zero to 25 MEUR of annual online revenue in just under 5 years.

Stronger's founders Henric Grundén, Juri Gendelman, and Joel Almqvist originally founded the brand in a small t‑shirt printing shop in Stockholm.

Tech‑enabled business

With co‑founder Henrik’s background as a programmer, Stronger was a tech‑driven brand from day one. Strongerlabel.com was originally built on the Magento platform and coded by Henrik. However, as Stronger grew, tweaks, hacks, and custom solutions were added to the platform, which eventually started taking its toll on both performance and time‑to‑market for new features.

Downtime was common, as was slow loading times during peak seasons and special campaigns. They also had problems in scaling the solution to fit multiple markets, as they were carrying a lot of the old tweaks in the setup. No shame on Magento – the platform served the brand very well during the first few years. Especially considering how fast they grew online. But in order to take the brand to the next level while continuing growing, Stronger needed to completely rethink its ecommerce architecture – which meant taking a step back and carefully looking into other scalable platform providers.

A thorough platform evaluation

Stronger decided to do an evaluation of a wide range of platforms, which proved to be easier said than done.

On one side of the spectrum, they had API‑based composable platforms (such as CommerceTools) with a modular, best‑of‑breed approach to building the tech‑stack and frontend. The composable approach promised flexibility, at the cost of having to build and maintain a large amount of custom code. 

On the other side of the spectrum, there was Shopify Plus – a ready‑to‑use system with a wide selection of templates and integrations. A system with a lot of plugins, but built for the use‑case of a US‑based retailer. The Shopify route promised an out‑of‑the‑box solution with few technical issues to handle. However, that approach comes with limitations: cookie‑cutter integrations only, little flexibility, and a cumbersome, hard‑coded, approach to cross‑border commerce. 

Coming from Magento, the team at Stronger was intrigued by the composable approach, which promised similar flexibility as Magento, but with the advantage of a maintained software‑as‑a‑service core platform. However, dealing with a hacky Magento setup and maintaining customizations had taken its toll on the brand's patience, which made them a little hesitant towards going in that direction. On the other hand, they didn’t want to accept the limits of the Shopify Plus platform. Stronger realized that instead of building business value, they would have to invest their tech‑team's time in building mind‑numbing hacks around the limitations of Shopify and the negative effects on SEO which Shopify’s approach to international sales would cause.

In the midst of the evaluation, Stronger found Centra. A platform that was composable, but with the core features for scaling a DTC brand globally built‑in the platform – a hybrid version of the two approaches. Centra stood out from other composable platforms by focusing on solving problems for brands with global direct‑to‑consumer ambitions. Key features of the Centra platform included.

1. Fully headless. No CMS, no templates. The freedom to build a custom‑designed experience that truly represented the brand
   

2. One store for all markets globally. Automatically adapting based on the visitors Geo IP and more
   

3. Open APIs with access to most data in the platform, and a clear commitment to follow an API‑first approach

With the above options in mind, Stronger had found their sweet spot with Centra and teamed up with the digital agency Made People to start the project of completely re‑imagining the ecommerce architecture and design, which was planned to be rolled out just four months after signing.

Centra's composable technology provides true flexibility for building a powerful ecommerce experience

Strongerlabel.com ships to the world from local warehouses and is available in 10 languages

Impact: Global presence, higher conversion rates, more orders, and a decrease in costs and administration

After launching the new site in November, just one week prior to Black Friday, Stronger has seen huge improvements in both growth and efficiency. The instant results for November speak for themselves (all results are compared to 2020):

• A 167% increase in orders

• A 172% increase in total revenue

• A 14% increase in mobile conversion

• A 123% increase in total traffic

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