hessnatur

The German fashion brand hessnatur is one of the market leaders for natural textiles. The slow fashion company was founded by Heinz and Dorothea Hess in Butzbach near Frankfurt am Main in 1976 and describes itself as Germany’s most sustainable fashion brand. Besides organic baby and children’s clothing, its first-class product range also includes women’s and men’s fashion as well as outdoor wear and home textiles.

For almost half a century, hessnatur has stood for high quality and transparency from the cultivation of raw materials to the finished product.

The company has around 340 employees and operates stores in Butzbach, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich, a mail order catalogue business as well as a successful online shop based on an e-commerce software from SAP.

In 2018, hessnatur turned to the digital agency dotSource to receive sound strategic IT advice. As part of the consulting process, the IT system landscape was evaluated. In joint workshops, objectives were set in order to make the sustainable online fashion brand fit for the future.

What were the key objectives? The main focus was on migrating the existing online shop from SAP Hybris 5.7 to SAP Commerce 1905 – a big upgrade leap from on-premise to the cloud. This way, the future viability of the online shop is ensured and hessnatur can implement new ideas more quickly and more successfully, thus preventing security gaps.

Big upgrade leaps when migrating mean big challenges. Even if you stay loyal to your software provider for good reasons: the more versions you skip, the higher the effort and the more profound the necessary changes.

In the case of hessnatur, the challenge was to evaluate which older modules could not be migrated but had to be replaced with new components. It also had to be determined how the new back office would have to be structured.

Moreover, the company wanted to integrate a CMS to optimise product maintenance in terms of content.

The fruitful cooperation made it possible not only to accommodate the fashion company’s continuous growth with a customised online shop of the highest quality, but also to support sustainable growth in the future.

Thanks to the successful migration, hessnatur can continue to drive innovation in digital business together with dotSource as its digitalisation partner. This includes, for example, setting up a decoupled front end.