QLEVR is a Belgian group that brings together three strong brands offering products with real added value for babies and young children: AeroSleep, which makes safe sleep mattresses; Puckababy, which makes sleeping bags; and AeroMoov, which makes products for life on the go. All three used to run on Magento. Today they share a single Shopify account, three distinct storefronts, and one unified checkout.
- Migrated three brands to Shopify in around three to five months each, working through them one at a time.
- Used Sidekick to build around 80% of the metafield structure that automatically updates multilingual product images in Google Merchant Center.
The challenge: an outgrown setup dependent on agencies
Alexander Prinz, Head of Ecommerce Infrastructure at QLEVR, joined the company when it was still building on Adobe Commerce (Magento). The setup had evolved over time as the business grew. “It had been built to support our needs at the time, but as the company evolved, we realised there was an opportunity to simplify things and make the technology more proportionate to our business,” Alexander said. “It was also a relatively complex setup for the size of the business at the time, so we saw an opportunity to move to a more streamlined solution.”
The bigger cost was speed. Every change, however minor, had to go through an external agency. “It was time-consuming to work with, as many changes required support from our external agency,” Alexander said. “Testing a new app involved several steps: finding the right solution, having the agency install it in the test environment, moving it to staging for further testing, and finally deploying it to the live environment. After each Magento update, we also had to double-check whether anything had been affected and needed fixing.”
The decision to move away from Magento was also driven by the ongoing investment required to keep the platform secure and up to date. Rather than continuing to spend on regular maintenance and version updates, the company wanted to invest that budget in moving the business forward on a new platform.
The solution: piloting Shopify on a smaller brand first
QLEVR did not migrate its main brands first. The team moved Fidella, its baby carrier brand, to Shopify in-house as a pilot before deciding whether to migrate the larger brands. Once the pilot proved successful, the team worked with the agency dear digital to develop a solution for migrating the three brands to Shopify. Together, they built the infrastructure and migrated the brands one at a time: first AeroMoov, then AeroSleep, and finally Puckababy. Each migration took roughly three to five months.
A suggestion from dear digital shaped the whole architecture: keep every brand's product and customer data in a single Shopify account, rather than splitting it across three accounts, and use the headless CMS Storyblok to give each brand its own front end on top. “One of the goals of the migration was to bring the three brands closer together and create a more connected customer experience. Now we have a unique setup where all three brands are managed within a single Shopify account. We use the CMS Storyblok to create three distinct front ends in multiple languages, while they all share the very same Shopify checkout. The advantage is that customers can easily switch between the three brands while keeping the same basket, creating opportunities for cross-brand sales,” Alexander said.
I don't need to look up the documentation. With precise prompts, I can tell Sidekick exactly what I need, and it creates it for me.
Sidekick became part of how the team works day to day, not just during the migration. Alexander uses it to build Shopify Flow automations, and he used it to build most of a metafield structure that outputs multilingual product image data as JSON, shared through Channelable to Google Merchant Center.
The result: faster workflows across three unified brands
Having order and customer data in one Shopify account made day-to-day operations easier across all three brands. Filtering and reporting on orders and products improved immediately, and the team moved its newsletter platform to Klaviyo, using Shopify segments to split subscribers by brand, a switch Alexander described as straightforward.
Cross-team communication improved too. QLEVR's customer service team now uses order timeline notes to flag returns and leave context for colleagues, and Shopify Flow automations notify the team when a product goes out of stock or reaches end of life, so it can be pulled from the storefronts without manual checking.
The headless setup does add some friction that a standard Shopify store would not have. Apps that require frontend integration still need some development support, although implementation is generally less complex than it was with the previous setup. A popular server-side tracking app the team wanted was not built to support three brands on one account, so the team found an alternative. For Yotpo review requests, it built custom API calls in Shopify Flow that route each order to the right brand's account. Alexander does not consider this a mark against the platform. “In the end, we have an unconventional way to use Shopify... but the features that Shopify has are very handy and helpful for us, also in this kind of environment,” he said.
I'm happy with Shopify as a platform. It's a bit like a golden cage. It may not offer the same level of openness and flexibility out of the box as other platforms, but within that ecosystem, everything is well integrated, reliable and simply works. Shopify is also constantly evolving and improving.