Tekla: Improving conversion by 70% at record speed using Medusa

Tekla is a textile brand based in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was established in 2017 and now operates in more than 50 countries around the world. Tekla used WooCommerce for their first online store but quickly found that a more composable and headless architecture was needed to scale their e-commerce channel further. For that reason, Tekla became the first case that Medusa was built around.

Tekla’s Success Story

Tekla’s success is still on a high and it’s not a finished story yet, but here are some of the highlights of their success story since migrating to Medusa:

1. Their conversion rate increased by 70% compared to the Woocommerce solution they previously worked with.
2. They significantly reduced their customer service response hours as they were able to fully automate their return, exchange, and claim processes.
3. They grew their market reach from 2 markets to over 50 markets. They were able to perform this transformation in a matter of days.
4. They were able to switch ERP providers in a month. This kind of project usually takes 4-8 months with other ecommerce solutions.

The Challenge

• Lack of customization of their storefront stopped them from creating the desired customer experience that aligned with the brand identity.
• Restrictions in their choices and ownership of their tech stack made it hard to add new features or integrations.
• Difficulty in adding and managing multiple regions and currencies from a single platform.
• Lack of automation of core customer service workflows like return, exchange, and claim management.
• A slow storefront that led to a bad user experience.

The Solution: Medusa

• Fully customizable headless architecture that gives them the flexibility to create a unique customer experience in the “Tekla universe”.
• A scalable backend to support Tekla’s growth with the ability to add new features and integrations to best-in-breed tools.
• A multi-regional set up to operate in multiple different markets with multiple different currencies through a single platform.
• Fully automated returns process starting from the self-service return form on the storefront to the creation of swaps and fulfillment of orders.
• A much faster Jamstack storefront that allows customers to seamlessly explore their products.

The Story

Back in 2017, Tekla was struggling with its WooCommerce setup due to a lot of challenges related to its monolithic architecture, presenting them with many limitations.

After researching different solutions, it became clear that no platforms could cater to their requirements in a way that would be easily maintainable. Among many other platforms, Shopify was evaluated but was ultimately dismissed for its inflexible proprietary nature that would be hard to maintain and scale.

Instead, Medusa was chosen as a more developer-friendly alternative that would ensure Tekla’s long-term goals could be met. Tekla became Medusa’s first case.

Suggested Read: The Story Behind How We Created Medusa.

Medusa provided Tekla with everything they were looking for, allowing them to create a custom-designed storefront that would immerse their customers in the Tekla universe. Furthermore, Tekla saw incredible improvements in their storefront performance super powering the user experience of the website and ensuring better SEO scores.

Tekla has created a purchasing experience that aligns with the nature of its products by integrating with Contentful for rich CMS features. This enabled them to implement advanced features such as different image sets for their unisex sleepwear so that the user can change between a male or female model when browsing.

This integration with Contentful as well as other services is done seamlessly due to Medusa’s headless architecture and its plug-and-play integrations.

When it comes to managing their online store and configurations, Medusa’s dashboard offers an intuitive design and experience. This admin dashboard allows Tekla to manage their orders, returns, products, and much more all from a single platform.

This is immensely beneficial when it came to supporting +50 regions and currencies, as they don’t have to manage the products, prices, orders, and other settings and data for each market from different dashboards.

Medusa’s architecture also allowed Tekla to manage the full setup with only one frontend developer as the platform has been purposefully built to be easy to maintain.

How Tekla Utilizes Medusa

Tekla uses Medusa as the core of its ecommerce platform. Medusa has many features that make it a powerful platform. Some of Medusa’s features that Tekla uses and have contributed to its success story:

• Full tech-stack ownership since Medusa is an open-source solution.
• Multi-currency and regional support. Tekla sells in +50 markets with 6 currencies at the moment.
• Medusa’s ready-made plugins for third-party tools and services such as Contentful, Stripe, PayPal, MeiliSearch, Segment, and more.
• Full storefront customization to implement their custom design and experience.
• Ability to add custom integrations and services. Some of these integrations include Zendesk for live chat and customer support on their storefront and DHL as a fulfillment provider.
• A fully automated RMA flow allows them to spend significantly less time handling return orders, claims, and swaps.
• Include all necessary and basic ecommerce features to provide a better customer experience such as customer accounts, regions, and currencies based on automatic location detection, full checkout flow, and much more.

Get Started with Medusa

If you’re interested in getting started with Medusa and creating your own success story, check out our Quickstart guide to get set up in minutes.

Medusa is an open-source ecommerce platform with a growing community behind it. You can check out our GitHub repository with 10K+ stars.

You can also join our Discord server if you’re up for a chat or need any help while working on your Medusa server. You’ll be in direct touch with the team as well as other community members.