Winkelstraat.nl

Largest luxury fashion marketplace in the Netherlands embarks on a journey to flexibility and high business performance

About Winkelstraat.nl

Winkelstraat.nl is the largest luxury fashion marketplace and community, born and raised in the Netherlands. It brings together over 300 boutiques and brands from across Western Europe under one roof, aiming to make them more accessible to Millennial and Gen-Z audiences. The company's growth is attributed to its dedicated team of 45 employees who are committed to making Winkelstraat.nl highly scalable and performance-driven.

The Challenge

Winkelstraat.nl initially used Magento 1 as the foundation for its commercial activities. However, when the management faced the end of the platform's lifecycle, there were no doubts - the company decided to transition to Magento 2.

“The whole tech team is currently involved in the decision-making since we don’t have a large department. There are only six people, but each has a solid background and creative vision. So we take every opinion very seriously. We come together to make a final decision on what our commercial and technical stack will look like.”

Joost van der Veer

CEO & Founder, Winkelstraat.nl

On the other hand, the company made efforts to reduce its dependence on Magento and opted for a different solution for setting up the frontend part. Winkelstraat.nl decided to embark on its composable commerce journey with the aim of achieving better performance, flexibility, and ensuring a faster Time-to-Market.

“Using Magento 1, development of the frontend and the backend were intertwined and meant that all frontend releases needed to happen with the backend. It increased the release time due to requiring the backend to be ready to deploy. Updates to one meant updates to the other. It was one of the main reasons we chose to decouple the frontend and backend.”

Iain Croll,

Head of Product, Winkelstraat.nl

To turn this idea into reality, the company began searching for a solution that could meet the aforementioned requirements and provide developers with a user-friendly environment.

“We searched for a proven tool for frontend creation to become more scalable, decrease development time and ensure a shallow learning curve for engineers. Winkelstraat.nl had a couple of options. But after a deep investigation, we found an ideal candidate. It was a Alokai.”

Joost van der Veer

CEO & Founder, Winkelstraat.nl

Solution

As a result, Winkelstraat.nl chose Alokai due to its ability to accelerate Time-to-Market, offer the desired flexibility, and provide a comprehensive toolkit for scalable frontend development.

“We needed an enterprise-oriented and high-performance platform. Sure, our company is not an enterprise yet. Still, we have a significant amount of orders. So it was crucial to work with the framework that gives all opportunities for creating a scalable frontend.”

Joost van der Veer

CEO & Founder, Winkelstraat.nl

With Alokai, the Winkelstraat.nl team experienced a shallow learning curve because developers had relevant experience with Vue.js. This allowed them to roll out their frontend much faster and streamline the developer selection process.

“As our developers already knew Vue.js, it was easy for them to pick up Alokai. Creating templates in Alokai was particularly easy, and even other integrations, whilst more complex, did not take more than a few weeks to learn and understand. We have a new frontend developer starting, and we did not consider requiring specialists to have Alokai experience as we knew it would be easy for them to learn.”

Iain Croll,

Head of Product, Winkelstraat.nl

Empowered by Alokai's capabilities, the company successfully established a high-performing frontend within a tight schedule, thereby reducing development time and costs.

“We loved the Alokai’s out-of-the-box integration with Magento. It was one of the main reasons we chose the framework. It took a couple of days to design the basics, we made some customization, but the entire fundament is good. With Alokai, we could move pretty fast. It’s awesome because retail is very dynamic, so we had to roll out a high-quality result as fast as possible. Working with Alokai helped us improve web performance, optimize development processes, maintain and improve the frontend efficiently.”

Joost van der Veer

CEO & Founder, Winkelstraat.nl

Results

The composable commerce initiative proved to be a success. When selecting Alokai, Winkelstraat.nl also gained:

a flexible and user-friendly development environment
unlimited frontend scalability
faster Time-to-Market
reduced development costs
high conversion rates
better business performance

“Regarding scalability, we have not yet hit a limit. We worked closely with the Alokai team during our busiest period of 2021, Black Friday, to ensure that we did not encounter any problems. It turned out our abundance of caution was unnecessary as we did not encounter any issues with the frontend.”

Iain Croll,

Head of Product, Winkelstraat.nl