As Europe’s largest shoe retailer, selling millions of pairs across continents, your digital platform needs to keep pace. For Deichmann, that wasn’t the case – even after brushing shoulders with nearly every known eCommerce platform on the market. 

With over 4,700 physical stores, 41 online shops, and €9 billion in annual revenue, Deichmann’s footprint is colossal. But behind the scenes, a tangled web of legacy systems, regional silos, and a patchwork of platforms took hold. 

Something had to change – and it did, once they decided to commit to a new, future-ready commerce platform that fit their multi-brand and multi-store needs.

The Challenge: 7 Brands, 34 Countries, 41 Online Shops – Zero Synergy

Deichmann’s multi-decade growth has been one for the retail history books. But with it, the group accumulated quite a mixed bag of eCommerce systems. Nearly each one of their eight brands across 34 countries came with its own siloed capabilities – which they struggled to integrate into their core SAP system. This caused costly innovation bottlenecks and made scalability impossible without adding to the digital zoo and overall TCO. It’s a tale of legacy complexity that many retailers know all too well.

“When you have a very broad infrastructure, it makes sense to create synergies. In our case, each format and country came with its own system, which created quite a ‘zoo’ made up of the usual list of eCommerce systems – we probably had one of each. This made the further development of our capabilities very challenging.”

Severin Canisius, CIO, Deichmann Group

The Mission: Migrating A-SAP – Live with SCAYLE in 6 Months

Deichmann needed more than just an eCommerce platform; they needed a partner with the capabilities to handle multiple brands, grand-scale internationalization, and omnichannel excellence. SCAYLE, with its deeply engrained retail-DNA and enterprise-ready tech, ticked all the boxes. 

In just six months, Deichmann launched its previously SAP-run stores with SCAYLE, starting with Czechia and Slovakia. Romania and Bulgaria joined the lineup shortly thereafter, followed by Spain and Portugal just a month later. The goal? Replatforming all 41 stores and 7 brands to SCAYLE. So far, the mission is well underway, with the final stores to go live in the next few months.

How? By treating the migration as more than just a replatforming project – but as a cultural shift. Both SCAYLE and Deichmann teams collaborated closely to compose a unified setup that not only fits like a glove, but considers capabilities and needs for the every Deichmann brand – across borders and time zones.

“We may be strong in omnichannel, but SCAYLE is best-in-class eCommerce. So where we can, we’d like to learn from the best in order to advance our own eCom business together with SCAYLE.”

Severin Canisius, CIO, Deichmann Group

The Solution: From Silos to Synergies

SCAYLE delivered on the technical abilities Deichmann was looking for to minimize their enterprise complexities and boost their customer experiences well into the future:

• A modular, API-first, composable architecture that allows Deichmann launch new capabilities across brands at speed, and grow, expand, and internationalize with ease
• A built-in retail and fashion logic – including sizes, styles, and color variants as a standard
• A proven track record of seamlessly running 200+ shops on 99.99% uptime
• And a collaborative, hands-on working model that enables close collaboration between Deichmann’s and SCAYLE’s teams to develop a long-term vision and roadmap

“The question was how we could utilize the synergy of a group of our scale efficiently to both advance our growth as well as the customer experience. That’s when it became clear that we not only had to replatform, but rework the entire architecture.”

Severin Canisius, CIO, Deichmann Group

Moreover, SCAYLE:

• Centralized Deichmann’s product catalog as well as order, and customer management.
• Built new capabilities for Deichmann, adding to our out-of-the-box promotions feature.
• Implemented the SCAYLE Click & Collect omnichannel add-on and store locator.

Where in the past, every single process had to be individually carried out on every single system, features, add-ons, and updates can now be implemented across the board via the SCAYLE platform, delivering the speed, agility, and retail fluency to take Deichmann’s eCommerce aspirations to the next level.

The Results: Always A Step Ahead

Shedding a fragmented infrastructure that could no longer support Deichmann’s digital ambitions, the migration to SCAYLE has so far yielded faster, platform-wide rollouts, reduced enterprise complexities, and optimized omnichannel excellence. In addition to hitting their store migration target, Deichmann sees itself laying further eCommerce foundations that will benefit their entire brand network, with potential to add marketplace capabilities and strengthen customer loyalty.

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