Cartamundi goes all-in on headless commerce with VTEX

Challenge

Throughout its history, Cartamundi sold its Bicycle brand playing cards exclusively through retailers and distribution channels. Despite the cards’ enormous popularity, sales growth through channel partners had plateaued. Cartamundi decided to disrupt its business model and take control of its ecommerce future. The company made a strategic decision to establish one-on-one relationships with customers by taking their brands direct-to-consumer (DTC) via a headless commerce architecture—with Bicycle Playing Cards leading the way.  

Though going DTC made strong business sense for Cartamundi, they encountered a familiar challenge faced by many global companies: their regional brands worldwide were operating their local websites running on different tech stacks. This resulted in fragmented technology systems with no global website management, user experience, and commerce standards. 

The Cartamundi team understood that this fragmented approach would make it difficult and expensive to create a unified DTC presence for each brand across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Cartamundi recognized the need to integrate its technology stacks across the globe into one enterprise-grade, headless commerce platform to tackle these hurdles. This would allow them to replicate sites—and knowledge —worldwide efficiently.

Solution

After evaluating several ecommerce solutions, Cartamundi chose the VTEX Enterprise Digital Commerce Platform because of its API-first approach, which made it easy for Cartamundi to connect some of its existing applications to the new platform.

Working with a leading global digital experience firm, DEPT®, the VTEX team recognized they had to understand the end customer much better to define the right technology strategy. Using the insights of the research conducted, the team outlined different customer journeys, tailored to each specific customer type, and tested them to ensure effectiveness and identify the most suitable technology approach.

VTEX allowed Cartamundi to integrate with Contentful, a headless content management system, adding agility and flexibility to content creation. This integration enabled Cartamundi to make quick updates to the frontend across all channels without any impact on the commerce layer—reducing the time needed to launch new pages or sites and achieving a faster time to market. 

The company also integrated the best-in-breed search engine, Algolia, to increase conversion rates. This allowed Cartamundi to better facilitate the product search and discovery process for customers across commerce and content pages.

With VTEX’s infrastructure powered by AWS, Cartamundi can seamlessly scale its operations with demand. Because all of the technologies and solutions involved are MACH-certified, Cartamundi can quickly adapt its architecture to the evolving needs of the business. 

We had to design and architect something quickly to test it and get it into the marketplace in time for the holidays. We architected the site for speed, time-to-market, quality, and scalability.

Alex Glaser, manageing technology parnter, DEPT®

Results

The VTEX/DEPT team quickly got to work in the summer of 2022. By leveraging VTEX’s extensible, API-first architecture, Cartamundi launched its first website (bicyclecards.com) in the U.S. in time for the holiday season—in just five months. The decoupled frontend provides a non-technical, user-friendly interface that gives Cartamundi more flexibility over the experience to accelerate the publishing process. 

Besides seeking to grow revenue by selling Bicycle Cards direct-to-consumer, Cartamundi also wanted a technical foundation to replicate the rest of their brands throughout the world. The initial design and technical strategy ensure that the company can easily leverage the framework from bicyclecards.com to quickly stand up online stores for various brands in different locations, languages, currencies, and channels.  

Now that the Bicycle DTC site has successfully launched in the U.S., the project has entered phase two, which involves deploying the site in other regions across the globe and adding more Cartamundi brands.  

We were looking for a headless solution that could scale globally across multiple brands and countries. VTEX offered that ability better than other solutions.  

Patrick Lane, VP of Global Ecommerce, Cartamundi

As an AWS Partner, VTEX builds digital commerce solutions that provide efficient and customizable solutions. The VTEX solution utilizes technologies such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and AWS Elastic Beanstalk for cloud-based applications and API servers management, Amazon CloudFront, to deliver content near to where shoppers are, and Amazon RedShift based machine learning systems to assist our partner merchants with improving their shopping experiences.

*Every information and number seen in the above text were provided and approved by Cartamundi.