Diptyque opened in Paris in 1961, when three artist friends, Desmond Knox-Leet, Christiane Montadre-Gautrot and Yves Coueslant, filled a boulevard Saint-Germain shop with objects from their travels. Known for candles and fragrances built around the senses, travel, memory and intimacy, the brand still relies heavily on retail, with around 165 boutiques of its own, department store corners, resellers and airport travel retail. Ecommerce, less than a decade old at Diptyque, took off when Covid closed the shops.
In July 2026, Diptyque moved every market to Shopify in a single launch, on schedule and within scope, after a first cross-border launch for Europe in November 2025.
- Conversion rate up 14% across all stores from July to September 2026
- Checkout completion up 37% over the same period
- Pages loading 2.5 times faster
- New product and listing page designs delivered four times faster, in one month instead of three and a half to four
The challenge: two years spent fixing, not building
When Eugénie Samama, digital platforms director at Diptyque, joined in 2023, she inherited a highly complex ecommerce platform. It ran on a heavily customised headless stack built around Magento, with tools that had never been designed to work together and had lost their native behaviour along the way. “I spent my first two years debugging the platform… We were a real support team at that point,” she says.
The brand’s ambitions had outgrown it. Diptyque wanted to open new markets, personalise the customer journey and push its design further, but opening even two or three markets took too much time and money, every version upgrade meant reviewing everything, and the design teams felt tightly constrained next to other luxury brands. Guillemette Osburg, who arrived as chief digital officer during that period, shared the diagnosis: patching the existing stack would not take the brand any further. “However many fixes I tried, something new always went wrong. With Guillemette, we were quickly convinced that starting from scratch was the best solution for us,” says Samama.
The cost showed on both sides of the screen. In the first half of 2026, up to 40% of responses to the site’s satisfaction surveys described it as slow, buggy or not working. In 2025, the digital team also received 20 to 25 emails a day from ecommerce managers and customer service teams because something was not working.
The solution: a cross-border test, then one launch
Starting again raised a question: on which platform? Diptyque asked the agency VO2 to compare stacks against the pain points it had listed, and Shopify came out ahead. A line-by-line request for proposals and a three-year migration plan, designed to fund itself through lower maintenance and development costs, won over management. “It was a bit bold to go to top management and say: we’re wiping the slate clean on everything you built over the past six or seven years…” says Samama. Few large luxury brands had switched at the time, she adds.
To test the model, Diptyque began with a cross-border site for Europe, launched in November 2025 after about four months of actual work. Magento was still running alongside it, so Samama could compare the same job on both platforms: a new product listing page design took a month (two sprints) on Shopify, against three and a half to four months on Magento, where a different agency built it. Product pages followed the same pattern, and that ease persuaded the team to carry on.
The full migration was first planned market by market, but Diptyque’s search engine optimisation agency strongly advised against it, so the team prepared a single launch. Work ran from January to 20 July 2026, six and a half months, and Diptyque’s own IT team migrated every order and customer record since the ecommerce site opened, along with the content, so contributors did not have to re-enter anything. A second cross-border site, for Canada, opened the same day.
We kept to the schedule. We kept to the scope. We kept to everything by pressing the button just once.
The brief to VO2 was to shrink the stack and stay native. Shopify Markets lets one store serve most European countries, a middleware connects Shopify to Diptyque’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and the other tools run as apps inside Shopify. “For years I heard salespeople say: it’s plug and play, you’ll see… And then once you got your hands in, it quickly became hell. With our Shopify apps, we get what true plug and play is,” says Samama.
On Hydrogen, Shopify’s headless framework, the team’s tech lead built a gift finder that did not exist before and adapts to the time of year. A partner module adds a 360-degree view of engravings, and large visuals are designed for mobile, which accounts for 80% of traffic.
Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant, is no longer limited to the digital team that adopted it first. Ecommerce managers and merchandisers now use it for repetitive catalogue work, such as importing a batch of products with the right metadata in one go, a job that used to be done by hand. It understands requests in any language, and the team now spends its time framing the right request rather than carrying out each step by hand. “We’ve never used a tool like it. At Diptyque, everyone loves it and uses it: ecom teams, merchandising teams, local market teams… In one sentence, I ask it to export some metadata buried deep in a product page. It finds it, prepares my Excel file, I just press a button and it’s imported. It’s truly exceptional,” says Samama.
The result: faster pages and higher conversion
Between July and September, conversion rose 14% across all stores, according to Diptyque. Checkout completion rose 37%. The checkout had been a major pain point on the previous stack. “Having Shopify handle the whole checkout took an enormous weight off the team,” she says. Pages now load 2.5 times faster, which the team puts down to native image optimisation and a layer of code VO2 added on top.
Shoppers are complaining far less. In the site’s satisfaction surveys, responses describing it as slow or not working are now under 10%. Search held up as well. The team had warned management that rankings would dip during the replatforming. The dip was much shallower than forecast, and Diptyque has since gained 19 positions in its overall search ranking.
Where we used to be a bit of a DIY team, we’re becoming a real transformation team.
The inbox reflects it. Email volumes are now five to seven times lower. “We no longer have cache problems. You make a change, you refresh the page and you see it straight away, and that’s huge,” says Samama. She has not yet measured the productivity gain, only felt it, and expects the real year-on-year picture in the second half of 2027. Next year, the priority is the customer, with CRM and a renewed push on omnichannel.