VIA VAI is a Dutch family footwear brand nearly thirty-five years in the making. Marijn Pessers's parents founded it. She's now the second generation running marketing and ecommerce. The brand sells women's shoes (and, as of this year, men's too) across Europe through its own webshop, B2B partner stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, Germany, and France, and a flagship store in Amsterdam.
For years, VIA VAI ran its ecommerce on Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento). The platform worked. But every small change meant going through their agency, adding friction to a nimble 40-person team with ideas it wanted to act on immediately. In June 2025, VIA VAI migrated to Shopify and changed that entirely.
With Shopify, VIA VAI achieved:
- The seven-person marketing team now builds theme pages, collection filters, and content blocks in-house, without agency requests.
- VIA VAI launched Shop Pay within 10 months of going live on Shopify and recorded its first Shop Pay sale within the first week.
- The team completed the full migration from Magento in under three months.
The challenge: Constant patches and no room to move fast
Before Shopify, VIA VAI's seven-person marketing and ecommerce team had the ideas but not the independence. Every time they wanted to change a button, add a page block, or adjust a layout, they submitted a request to their agency and waited. For a team that moved with startup energy inside a thirty-five-year-old family company, that friction was expensive.
Magento also came with recurring maintenance demands. Patches and updates drained time and money that weren't generating meaningful return.
"We really wanted extra autonomy for our team and to be able to make decisions faster internally," said Marijn Pessers, marketing manager at VIA VAI.
The team knew what they wanted: a more mature platform that didn't require a developer for every tweak, and one that could keep pace with how they actually worked. When their agency helped evaluate their options, Shopify stood out fast.
"It was immediately clear that Shopify was the right platform for us," Marijn said.
The solution: Shopify and Sidekick as an in-house development team
VIA VAI went live on Shopify in June 2025, with the help of our partner, Bluebird Day, and completed the migration in under three months. The only hold-up was integrating their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which pushed the launch back about a month. Everything else went smoothly.
Once live, the team discovered how much they could do themselves. They use Sidekick daily, for everything from pulling analytics and building custom reports to generating code and working through creative decisions. When they wanted to add quick filters to a collection page, they sketched it out on a whiteboard first. Then built it themselves, exactly as envisioned, no agency request required.
"We call ourselves in-house developers right now because of that improvement," Marijn said.
VIA VAI's team made Shopify's AI tools part of their daily rhythm. Instead of writing detailed briefs for developers, they could build multicolumn layouts, refresh a sustainability page with new imagery, and test ideas the same day they had them. Customer service and logistics got easier too. The back-end was far simpler to navigate than what they'd had on Magento.
"Now we can just do it ourselves, and with our agency we can focus on data analysis and conversion rate optimization. That's a better collaboration as well," Marijn said.
The result: Less maintenance, more momentum
Ten months in, the team acts on ideas the same day they have them. No more small requests to their agency, no more waiting.
The relationship shifted too. What was once spent on maintenance patches and layout fixes now goes toward data analysis, store improvements, and conversion rate work. Less tactical. More strategic.
They add new capabilities with each of Shopify's twice-yearly releases. VIA VAI is still early in this chapter. But they're building exactly what they imagined, and they're doing it themselves.
If you're looking for autonomy and scalability, and to not be dependent on an agency for every small change, Shopify is the right platform for you