Hygraph

Hygraph, formerly known as "GraphCMS", is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that follows the Headless philosophy, meaning the technical separation of frontend and backend. The system is designed and built API-first and can therefore be connected particularly well to complex IT architectures.

We have been a Hygraph partner since 2021.

When designing the digital platform for Gamescom 2021 on behalf of Koelnmesse, we faced the challenge of setting up a best-of-breed architecture without using a commerce system.

Instead of the commerce component, our central challenge was that for the Gamescom digital platform, numerous exhibitors wanted to maintain their new games themselves, and this had to be intuitive and require little onboarding. Accordingly, the CMS needed particular strengths in connectivity, because we wanted to connect it to the composable commercetools frontend (back then still "Frontastic"). That is how we came across Hygraph (back then still "Graph CMS"). The interplay of the two systems, and also of the technology partners behind them with us as the implementer, worked so well and reliably that we delivered Gamescom 2022 with exactly the same tech stack. And Gamescom 2023 is currently being developed further on this basis as well.

In e-commerce we have faced recurring challenges for years: reconciling IT's complex requirements for commerce processes and data handling with marketing's requirements for excellent, flexible and easily maintainable content when setting up an e-commerce platform.

Through our work with Hygraph at Gamescom we found an exciting approach to this and ultimately used Hygraph in a best-of-breed commerce solution too: the sport2000.de retail platform for our client ANWR Media Group runs on the commerce side on the microservice solution from commercetools, with content delivered via the Headless commercetools frontend.

And this architecture too, which went live in autumn 2021, is so convincing in daily business that it is also the basis for the upcoming relaunch of schuhe.de, the highest-traffic and highest-revenue platform at ANWR.

It is soooo important that it may sound like a cliche, but here it really does apply, and we love it: in Hygraph we have found a technology partner with whom we work on equal footing, solution-oriented, on the best possible solution for the client. We pull in the same direction, and that is simply fun! On the other side, in vendor support, you then also have someone who knows their stuff, wants to solve problems, and does not cling to areas of responsibility. That is a question of attitude, and everyone simply benefits from it.

And there are a few hard KPIs on top:

Hygraph lets hundreds of users with different requirements and permissions work together on one large body of work. In large organizations with complex editorial workflows, that is worth its weight in gold.
The Hygraph API is especially developer-friendly and really easy and quick to connect to. Although Hygraph is geared specifically toward enterprise requirements, some of our developers also use the system in smaller private projects, simply because it is so convenient!
With Hygraph, developers can quickly provide highly individual data and content structures. This makes the solution ideal for realizing very specific requirements.
With this unique approach to external data sourcing, the platform creates many use cases that go beyond previous market solutions.
With Hygraph we can deliver content, size charts and blog content in a targeted way in the frontend and thereby improve the user experience.

We currently use the Hygraph solution at our clients Gamescom/Koelnmesse and ANWR Sport2000/schuhe.de. In total, from 2021 to today, we have implemented 4 e-commerce architectures in which we used Hygraph CMS as the solution.

With its new federated content platform, Hygraph has ushered in a new era of Composable architectures. The federated content platform lets us combine and use content and data from different sources seamlessly and in real time in a single application.

The convenience in use is the decisive point here: we can easily bundle content from multiple sources in Hygraph, connect the frontend, and then receive all the content through a single API. Should one data source change, we can simply adjust the connection from Hygraph to another data source, without having to "touch" the code itself. This is how we picture smart IT architecture, and we look forward to working this way.

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