Case study
50,000 orders in 30 minutes.
- Sector
- Health and wellness
- Region
- Europe, expanding to North America
- Partners
- AWS and Ayata
- Live in
- 2 months
Key results
The Quality Group is a powerhouse in Europe’s health and wellness market. Headquartered in Elmshorn, Germany, TQG owns beloved consumer brands like ESN, More Nutrition, and Foodist, and sells hundreds of individual health and fitness products across channels and markets. Driven by a unique digital direct-to-consumer and social commerce model, TQG’s business is booming, attracting global investors like CVC Capital Partners, who joined in 2022 to support their rapid international growth.
Many brands, many channels
Legacy systems couldn’t handle hypergrowth, or hypertraffic
The Quality Group is a campaign-driven business, leveraging dedicated flash sales, influencer campaigns, and brand weeks. A key driver of the business are the company’s big brand and sales weeks happening during summer, for Black Week and during the month of January, to support the community in starting the new year right. On top of that, there are weekly sales campaigns, offering special rebates and launching exciting new products and product variants.
The nature of this business naturally leads to huge differences in traffic and orders which historically proved a challenge to all systems involved in seamless order execution.
“Over the last 2 years, we have invested a lot of effort into replacing legacy systems and setting up a technical infrastructure that is highly flexible in terms of scalability. Plus, we have established playbooks and regular testing periods, that help prepare people, processes and systems to handle the load.”
TQG’s flash sales spike traffic within minutes. Their legacy tech stack could no longer meet their needs. Before Fluent Order Management and AWS, the team experienced:
- Overselling and high cancellation rates
- System outages and order processing crashes
- Inaccurate stock availability
- Fragmented, non-standardized order flows
- Lack of real-time visibility and centralized order control
“Initially our technology stack couldn’t keep up with our scale and the immediate surges in traffic which caused massive issues. During peak periods, our systems would fail. Customers would experience long waiting times in our shop, stock levels weren’t updated quickly enough, orders were lost when being imported into warehouses, shops had inaccurate stock, all of it obviously leading to a suboptimal customer experience,” said Nina.
Agile, centralized order orchestration built to scale
To fix this, TQG turned to Fluent Order Management, deployed on Amazon Web Services, and implemented by Ayata.
“The Quality Group extends across many shops, warehouses, and channels. We realized that we needed a tool to standardize the format in which orders come in. One central system to organize these orders and distribute the stock from multiple locations to multiple channels. That’s when we started looking for a solution and found Fluent Order Management. The flexibility that the system offers, the modern setup, and the scalability fit our needs.”
Fluent Order Management became the central system for:
- Order standardization and orchestration across all channels
- Real-time inventory availability
- Flash-sale fulfillment logic, optimized for volume and velocity
- Stock distribution across warehouses and D2C channels
- Customer service workflows to streamline order modifications
Not to mention, it enabled their technical strategy of continuous deployments. Frequent smaller deployments allow The Quality Group to remain agile and able to react to market needs, fast.
“It sits in the middle and has the flexibility and ability to react to the different needs of many systems. We prefer systems that are set up in the way Fluent Order Management is, where we can very fast, even continuous deployments and a high flexibility of interfaces for interaction. This enables speed and agility. All while making everything less error-prone,” said Nina.
“After the switch to AWS serverless technologies, we have not had a single outage related to cloud infrastructure. Flash sales are no longer something we need to worry about because the platform that we provide is so scalable and flexible. This is one of the great advantages if you’re in a hyper-growth phase and you have no chance to predict how the growth will work.”
One fulfillment centre became many, and the robots keep pace with the flash sale.
Fluent Order Management distributes stock across warehouses and D2C channels and sources every order from the most efficient location, so 50,000 orders in half an hour land where they can actually be picked. ESN, More Nutrition and Foodist all run through the same floor.
- Fulfillment network
- Scaled from one centre to many, plus a gym and event store
- Inventory
- Real-time availability across every sales channel
“We know Fluent will be important as we grow into B2B and beyond. Things like delivery promises, localized assortments, and cross-border inventory visibility will matter more and more.”
Results
Fluent Order Management and AWS helped TQG deliver stability, speed, and growth, without sacrificing customer experience.
“Since going live, we’ve expanded into new sales channels, marketplaces, countries and added new brands. As well as adding feature functions progressively. Something we simply couldn’t achieve before with previous systems. We’re now fulfilling orders from the most efficient location, serving the customer quicker and more profitably. It’s a win-win situation,” said Selim Tansuğ, COO, The Quality Group.
In 2 months, Ayata had TQG live. Fluent Order Management and their AWS infrastructure has aided The Quality Group through their rapid growth. Now, they have the agility and stability to scale their fast-moving social commerce and flash sales with ease.
What’s next: new regions, new brands, and B2B
TQG continues to explore growth, both in North America with its recent acquisition of RAW Nutrition and through targeted expansion in B2B wholesale. While the B2C experience is now tightly integrated, Fluent Order Management is expected to play a growing role in channel and inventory management for wholesale customers as well.
“We know Fluent will be important as we grow into B2B and beyond. Things like delivery promises, localized assortments, and cross-border inventory visibility will matter more and more to ensure smooth and reliable interactions with big retail partners.”
Deployed on Amazon Web Services, implemented by Ayata.
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