Teddy Group is an Italian fashion retailer. Three of its brands, Rinascimento, Terranova, and Calliope, each run their own ecommerce operation and team, serving around 30 online markets. Over five months the group moved all three to Shopify, one at a time, and kept development in-house throughout.
- 4x faster frontend development. Work that took two weeks now takes a day.
- 2 to 3x more development on the same annual budget, with 60% to 70% lower cost per new build.
The challenge: three brands, slow releases, rising costs
Teddy Group had spent five to six years customizing Magento. Each of the three brands had its own instance, and every instance sat on cloud machines the group sized, monitored, and patched itself. The cost showed up twice: once on the invoice from the infrastructure provider, and again in the hours internal staff and outside vendors spent keeping the machines healthy.
Small requests behaved like large ones. A modest new feature still meant an analysis phase, a cost estimate, a release window, and a performance check afterward to confirm nothing had degraded. "Every time we asked for a new development, even a relatively small feature, the analysis time, the costs, and the release time had become very significant," says Cesare Malavasi, digital architect and experience strategist at Teddy Group. About a hundred project and enhancement requests reached his team each year, on a platform that did not evolve on its own, and everything the market produced and everything the brands imagined landed in the same slow queue. "Taking them in, prioritizing them, convincing the brands, costing everything out, it was an enormous amount of work," Cesare says.
The group ran a full software selection, shortlisting Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento Cloud, and Shopware. Magento Cloud went first, since it still required the group to configure and scale the same infrastructure, only on someone else's machines. Shopware followed, on the grounds that it was young and lacked large enterprise references. Shopify won the final round on three points: an interface the brand operations teams could actually use, pricing tied to revenue rather than a multi-year commitment on a number the group would have to guarantee in advance, and a development ecosystem that cost less to hire into.
The solution: one SaaS platform the teams run themselves
Migration ran brand by brand rather than all at once. Each team took two to three months to settle, less because of the platform than because people who had worked one way for years were now working another way. Teddy Group planned for that and moved on.
The technical path mixed third-party apps with software the group wrote itself. Standard apps carried part of the load, and where they did not, the team built its own and plugged them in. What mattered was that both could sit on the same platform. "Being able to connect our own apps very easily… that saved us often too," says Sara Nevischio, project manager digital at Teddy Group.
Teddy Group hit maximum pressure partway through the migration, with no spare capacity to hire into. The team put Shopify's Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling to work on both sides of the problem, using the developer-facing side for the technical build and the operations-facing side to give each brand's team what it needed directly.
The whole MCP side, especially the developer side, let us do the development ourselves.
Frontend work moved onto Liquid rather than a headless build, which the team found substantially quicker to work in than Magento's PHP. Backend work sped up too, on the strength of APIs that already existed instead of ones the group had to write first.
The result: more shipped, less spent, conversion up
The infrastructure line disappeared on day one. Server sizing, machine maintenance, monthly invoice checks, and the vendor hours behind all of it were eliminated completely, from the day each of the three went live. The platform fee replaced them at a fraction of what they had cost, and the hidden costs did not come back.
Two contracts went with them. The group no longer retains an agency for routine maintenance, and it no longer pays for external 24/7 support, having brought support in-house. Beyond the saving, that gave the team direct governance over its own systems instead of a third party who called them anyway whenever something broke.
Development throughput is where the change reads most clearly. Frontend delivery runs four times faster, helped by AI tooling but roughly three times faster without it. Backend delivery runs three times faster with AI, twice as fast without. A large project spanning both, which used to fill a quarter, now takes a month to six weeks.
We do two or three times the things we used to do, with the same money as before.
The cost per piece of work fell with it, averaging 60% to 70% below the previous platform, and by Cesare's estimate reaching as much as 85% on the group's Algolia integration.
Teams changed what they asked for. Instead of filing enhancement requests into a queue that rarely moved, brand teams now watch each Shopify release and pick up what applies to them, reserving custom work for the few things specific to their category. That freed the group to work on performance questions it had never had room for, including reducing return rates.
Marketing teams feel it daily. A banner requested in the morning can be live in the afternoon, opening a new market takes minutes on the frontend, and shipping copy changes ahead of the Christmas peak no longer start with a ticket. "If communications asks for a banner in the morning, it might be there in the afternoon. These things used to be unthinkable," Sara says.
The teams also started A/B testing for the first time, using Rollouts, and use Sidekick to build banners without design support, to work out platform settings, and to run order and customer analysis.
Conversion rates on the Italian web store rose 30% at both Rinascimento and Calliope. Calliope, the last to migrate, came through without disruption. Terranova's was the most demanding of the three, and it has since recovered strongly with its conversion rate holding steady. "Replatforming definitely helped improve conversion in double digits," says Andrea Arcangeli, digital director at Teddy Group.