With a vision to design and create the perfect demi-fine jewellery for the everyday wardrobe, Missoma’s iconic aesthetic of layered necklaces and pendants has made it one of the 100 fastest-growing companies in Europe today. You may have seen the jewellery on the likes of royalty, including Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, as well as on supermodels Gigi Hadid, Kaia Gerber, and Kendall Jenner.
While you can find Missoma stocked in exclusive stores such as Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, and Nordstrom, 97% of its sales are still direct to customer. Like so many brands that began as hobbies, Missoma started on a custom-built platform maintained by a small team. Having now replatformed to Shopify Plus, Missoma has enjoyed:
- Migrating its site in only eight days during the busy holiday season
- Monthly cost savings of 60% on infrastructure management
- No longer requiring third-party support to monitor site security and performance
Challenge
Having experienced significant growth since 2015, Missoma’s team realized it needed to ensure the platform would keep up with the brand’s ambitions—especially with its sights set on expanding internationally.
With a team of only three people managing a custom platform, the decision was made to replatform mid- to long-term, with a carefully planned migration roadmap established as part of its international capacity planning.
But that was before Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2019.
Unprecedented demand and a rush of BFCM traffic pushed Missoma’s custom platform to its limit. Determined to be able to keep up with surges in traffic that were anticipated coming soon over Christmas and Boxing Day, the company decided it needed to make a change and make it fast.
We worked together as a team on the migration. Everyone had a role to play.
Solutions
In only eight days, and during its busiest month of the year, Missoma migrated its $25 million business to Shopify Plus to manage its increased volume of traffic.
Missoma enjoyed almost zero loss in site functionality during the switch.
The short time between BFCM and Christmas actually ended up being a benefit for the brand’s migration, forcing decisions to be made on a priority basis and without wasting time on unnecessary aspects. “You should always make the best decisions for the business without holding yourself back by previous plans,” says Simon Hamblin, Missoma’s chief technology officer.
It was really intuitive, and we had everybody in the company bought into the migration to Shopify Plus. It's amazing what you can do when you have the whole team going in the same direction for the same purpose.
Results
Fueled by a successful, rapid migration, Missoma relishes that it now works with zero or low code—a major back-end feat for a business of its size.
The brand also saved 60% of its monthly information technology infrastructure and licensing costs in moving to Shopify Plus, no longer requiring additional third-party support in relation to monitoring performance and security.
With migration behind it, Missoma is now focusing on its international expansion strategy, as well as developing a new necklace layering tool that allows customers to try different layering looks before they buy.
The company has also found several areas of its retail business that have benefitted from the greater agility and flexibility of Shopify Plus, such as recently enabling gift cards and founding a loyalty program.
We don't focus on operations and server capacity issues anymore. We just focus on delivering value to the business. We have accelerated our roadmap so much already just by going live on Shopify Plus.