Emma prepares for global growth with Fluent Order Management

The organisation

Founded in 2013, Emma® is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest global sleep company. Known for their flagship Emma® Bed-in-a-box, the company has seen rapid growth. With over €800m in sales in 2022, the brand has expanded into 30 countries. They work with more than 200 retailers, in 3,500 stores across the globe.

The challenge

While Emma® began as a start up, they have since expanded rapidly. They started to sell across multiple channels, including their own website, offline retailers, and large marketplaces. As a result, their business became more complex. They needed better inventory data visibility across all their locations, and the ability to support local fulfilment requirements in different markets. In response to this rise in complexity, they began to add custom extensions to their existing ecommerce system. But over time, this became a problem. Why?

Because, like many legacy commerce platforms, it was based on a monolith architecture. This meant making any changes to the system was complicated and slow. A significant amount of work was needed to fix bugs in the system during any new feature development. In addition, on a number of occasions the platform simply broke. It became clear that Emma’s original systems were interfering with their business goals. In order to scale their business, and give customers the best possible experience, they needed new, agile technology.

The solution

Emma chose to undertake a complete replatforming project. This would be known as the Emma Commerce Operating System (EmmaCOS), and made up of modern composable commerce solutions. commercetools was chosen as the vendor for the Emma e-commerce backbone, and Fluent Order Management was selected as the best fitting distributed order management system. Why Fluent Order Management?

In short, Fluent Order Management was chosen for its flexibility and scalability. Emma® needed a solution that would meet their needs across multiple markets. This included the ability to:

• See a single view of inventory across their ever expanding network of locations
• Easily adapt fulfilment logic to meet each new country’s unique requirements
• View all orders across all channels
• Scale to meet peak season volumes with ease

Furthermore, having separate commerce and order management solutions allowed them to quickly onboard new suppliers without impacting their business. This has been a crucial factor in allowing them to continue to grow quickly.

The rollout

Ayata Commerce helped with the initial rollout of Fluent Order Management and in just 4 months transferred the knowledge to the Emma® team so they could manage further rollouts themselves.

Emma® started with a MVP in reduced risk markets and built a core model that could then be applied and tailored to local requirements, while using an agile method with sprints to manage the rollout.

Results

• Rolled out 4 major markets across the globe and over 30 countries in 18 months, with a plan to roll out in a further 10 within the next two months
• Increased sales due to accurate inventory availability data
• Scaled to meet spikes in demand — during Black Friday 2022, the Mexican market processed three times the number of orders as the previous year, but with 95% less system maintenance
• Streamlined customer service processes so their agents can better support customer requests

What’s more, with Fluent Order Management they don’t need to worry about the underlying tech, so the Emma® team can focus on their business needs. This has put Emma® back in the driving seat as they prepare for even more growth.

Due to Fluent handling the underlying technology, the focus of the team at Emma® shifted more towards achieving business goals. This alignment with modern tech principles allows Emma® to be more innovative in providing service to end customers, rather than focusing on the technology itself.

Aif Azhary, Product Manager, Emma – The Sleep Company

As we keep extending our markets, channels, and products, a scalable, robust and flexible platform for e-commerce and fulfilment is key for long-term and sustainable growth in both direct-to-consumer as well as B2B business. We are confident that our re-platforming endeavour and the result of a new composable platform enables Emma® to sustain its stellar growth trajectory.

Andreas Westendörpf, Chief Technology Officer, Emma – The Sleep Company