When did we become a Hygraph partner?

We’ve been partners with Hygraph since 2021.

During the conception of the digital platform for Gamescom 2021, commissioned by Kölnmesse, we faced the challenge of setting up a best-of-breed architecture without using a commerce system. Instead of focusing on commerce, our central challenge was that numerous exhibitors on the Gamescom platform needed to independently manage and update their new games with minimal training and ease of use. The CMS needed to excel in connectivity, as we aimed to integrate it with the composable Commercetools Frontend (then known as “Frontastic”). That’s how we came across Hygraph (then known as “GraphCMS”). The collaboration between the two systems—and also between the technology partners and us as the implementers—worked so well that we used the same tech stack to deliver Gamescom 2022. And now, the platform for Gamescom 2023 is currently being developed on the same foundation.

Why did we choose Hygraph as a partner?

In e-commerce, we repeatedly encounter challenges when balancing the complex technical requirements of commerce processes and data handling with marketing’s demand for excellent, flexible, and easy-to-manage content on an e-commerce platform.

Through our work with Hygraph for Gamescom, we found an exciting approach and eventually implemented Hygraph in a best-of-breed commerce solution: The retail platform sport2000.de, which we developed for our client ANWR Media Group, is built on Commercetools’ microservice architecture for commerce, with content delivered via the headless Commercetools Frontend.

This architecture, which went live in the fall of 2021, has been so effective in day-to-day operations that it now serves as the foundation for the upcoming relaunch of schuhe.de—ANWR’s highest-traffic and highest-revenue platform.

What do we appreciate most about Hygraph?

It might sound cliché, but it’s so true and we love it: With Hygraph, we’ve found a technology partner who truly collaborates with us at eye level to find the best possible solution for our clients. We’re all working towards the same goal—and it’s simply fun! When you have a support team on the other side that’s knowledgeable, wants to solve problems, and doesn’t get bogged down in responsibilities, it’s a game-changer. This kind of mindset benefits everyone involved.

And here are a few key hard facts:

• Hygraph enables hundreds of users with different roles and permissions to work together on a large project. In large organizations with complex editorial workflows, this is invaluable.
• Hygraph’s API is extremely developer-friendly and can be integrated quickly and easily. Although Hygraph is designed for enterprise-level requirements, some of our developers even use it in smaller private projects—simply because it’s so user-friendly!
• With Hygraph, developers can quickly create highly customized data and content structures, making it the ideal solution for addressing very specific needs.
• This unique approach to external data sourcing creates many use cases that go beyond current market solutions.
• Hygraph allows us to target specific content, size guides, and blog entries to improve the user experience on the front end.

Our experience with Hygraph:

We are currently using Hygraph for our clients Gamescom/Kölnmesse and ANWR Sport2000/schuhe.de. Since 2021, we’ve implemented four e-commerce architectures utilizing the Hygraph CMS.

That’s what we’re looking forward to in the future with Hygraph:

Hygraph’s new Federated Content Platform has ushered in a new era of composable architectures. The Federated Content Platform allows us to seamlessly combine and utilize content and data from various sources in real-time within a single application.

What stands out most is the ease of use: We can easily bundle content from multiple sources within Hygraph, connect the frontend, and then access all the content through a single API. If a data source changes, we simply adjust Hygraph’s connection to the new source—without needing to modify the code. This is what we envision smart IT architecture to be like—and we’re excited to keep working this way.

Akeneo offers a modern Product Information Management (PIM) system to collect, manage and enrich product information, create a product catalog and distribute it to sales and e-commerce channels.

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