Luckybeard

About Luckybeard

Luckybeard is an experience architecture consultancy, established in 2014, with offices in London, Dublin, Johannesburg and Pretoria. We build consumer-facing technology for enterprise clients and funded start-ups, architecting experiences that close the gap between where a brand is and where it could be.

We take a whole-system view of experience, working as an ecosystem of experts across three disciplines. Brand defines the ambition and builds the foundations. Product designs the experiences people use every day. Technology delivers them, spanning experience platforms, commerce, CRM and data, AI advisory, and the ongoing support and optimisation of everything we build.

Most of our work is with large, complex organisations: banks and insurers, Telcos, grocery and retail groups, healthcare and pharmaceutical businesses, and travel and lodging brands. We also work with funded start-ups, shaping products in their earliest stages. We are around 110 people, roughly 50 of them engineers across back-end, integration and front-end disciplines.

Medusa Cases

We came to Medusa in 2025, when SPAR asked us to guide their commerce platform selection. Working alongside their team, we shortlisted paid and open-source options and evaluated each against what the business needed. SPAR selected Medusa in consultation with us, and we built the MVP that launched in Botswana. The platform is now rolling out across South Africa, and a major South African Telco has since chosen the same stack.

Every project we run is on Medusa Cloud. It is fully managed, cost-efficient and keeps our clients on a current, stable version of Medusa, and we make a point of helping clients understand why that matters.

Highlighted Case: SPAR — One Catalogue, 650 Independent Retailers, Every Price Different

SPAR's existing commerce platform was built in South Africa, available only through a mobile app, and expensive to reuse in any other Southern African market. We guided SPAR through platform selection, evaluating the options together against the demands of the business. SPAR selected Medusa in consultation with us, and we built the web MVP that launched in Botswana.

The most demanding part is promotions. SPAR runs in-store specials, rewards-member pricing, multi-buy offers and bundle pricing at the same time. Stock and price arrive by flat file every 15 minutes, promotion data arrives separately as JSON, and every combination has to resolve to one correct price. We extended Medusa's core promotions engine to do exactly that.

The platform now serves a progressive web app and a mobile app, with Strapi for content, and is rolling out across 650 SPAR stores in South Africa. Each store is an independent retailer: they share a catalogue of around 10,000 products, but hold their own stock and set their own prices. We didn't build this for SPAR. We built it for 650 independent retailers.

Other Medusa Cases

• Telco Commerce: Rebuilding the website, self-service portal and commerce experience of a major South African Telco as one journey, on Medusa and Contentful, launching in 2027.

Medusa Specializations

Integration is where we're strongest. We connect systems that speak very different protocols, standardise the data that comes out of them, and feed it into Medusa cleanly and efficiently.

On SPAR

• Sigma — the in-store point-of-sale system, which exports by flat file. We built a complete .NET ingestion back end to process those files into Medusa, once, and it runs across every store in the rollout.
• Silo — the product information management system, integrated over API. It enriches the Sigma data during ingestion so every product arrives in Medusa complete and ready to merchandise.
• SAP — the enterprise resource planning system, reached through the point of sale rather than integrated directly. We ingest from the POS and send sales data back to it, and the POS keeps SAP in step.
• SAP CDC — the identity layer, managing customer authentication and profile data consistently across every channel the platform serves.
• Transaction Junction — the payment gateway for the South African rollout, currently in implementation and built for the volumes a national grocery estate generates.
• Algolia and Medusa Search — search launched on Algolia and is now migrating to Medusa Search, which performs well across a catalogue of this size and shape.
• Strapi — the headless CMS, running alongside the commerce engine so content and products are managed independently and composed into one experience.

On our Telco implementation

• Contentful — the digital experience platform, composed with Medusa so products surface naturally inside the customer journey rather than sitting behind a separate shop.
• React, Next.js and AWS — the experience layer, hosted on AWS, with Medusa as the commerce engine behind it and Contentful driving the content.

Plugins & Starters

• Extended promotions engine — resolves which price applies in which scenario across in-store specials, rewards-member pricing, multi-buy offers and bundle pricing, going well beyond standard promotion handling.
• Custom Medusa Admin extensions — additional Admin screens for capturing and managing the non-standard merchant data an operation depends on. Built for SPAR, and in build for our Telco implementation.
• Luckybeard Medusa accelerator pack (in development) — a reusable starting point for commerce builds, drawn from what we've learned across our implementations, so future projects start further down the road.
• Agentic tooling on the Medusa MCP (in development) — experiments with the Medusa MCP to stand up commerce environments quickly, securely and repeatably.

What We're Best At

• Industries — financial services, grocery and retail, Telco, healthcare and pharmaceutical, and travel and lodging.
• Consumer experience — our main focus is direct-to-consumer, where the craft of the experience does the selling. We also bring strong B2B commerce capability, and our Telco platform serves business and personal customers side by side.
• Integration at scale — connecting legacy and modern systems across very different protocols, standardising the data and feeding it into Medusa cleanly.
• The whole experience layer — progressive web apps, mobile apps, headless storefronts, and the design systems that hold them together as they scale.
• Platform selection and beyond — guiding clients through commerce platform selection, running the evaluation alongside their teams, then building what we recommended and optimising it long after launch.

Collaboration and co-creation sit at the heart of how we deliver. We work best alongside clients who want to shape the experience with us, and those are the partnerships that create the most value on both sides.