A partnership for sustainable digital development

engbers from Gronau is a menswear outfitter that sells its own brands exclusively. With four labels, engbers, engbers XXL, ENGBERS Germany and emilio adani, the company offers a complete assortment for different target groups. Online, engbers is present with two shops: engbers.com for all brands and emilioadani.com exclusively for the young brand.

To secure its digitalization for the long term, the company is today the main shareholder of Shopmacher, a strategic investment since 2010 through which owner Bernd Bosch has brought a specialized agency firmly to his side.

engbers has been one of the fashion industry's online pioneers since 2000. Shopmacher have supported the menswear outfitter's digital development since 2009 and have delivered three relaunches in that time. The basis of the collaboration is a retainer model that Shopmacher developed specifically for engbers. With fixed monthly resources, continuous optimizations are implemented. This approach kept the shop competitive even after five years, without a heavy project load and without the need for constant relaunches.

As early as 2015/16, engbers and Shopmacher adopted a headless architecture that separated frontend and backend in Oxid eSales, long before headless approaches were common in the market. This laid the foundation for developing e-commerce further, step by step and flexibly.

But even though the system worked well for engbers on the outside, the technical foundation was no longer future-proof. The custom-built frontend solution was no longer being developed, the server software was outdated and insecure, and the Oxid backend offered no further perspective.

In 2024, engbers decided on a relaunch with support from Shopmacher. This step was possible because engbers had already adopted a headless architecture back in 2015/16 with a standalone frontend. As a result, the decoupling of frontend and backend was established early on and could now be used to swap out the backend and rebuild the frontend without any major changes visible to users.

The frontend was technically migrated onto the commercetools frontend, but its design and user journey remained practically unchanged. The goal was to preserve the proven customer experience while replacing the outdated technical foundation. Specific requirements that engbers had for a service app during this transition were realized efficiently through a Progressive Web App (PWA).

Within the existing retainer model, the shop is now continuously developed, ensuring that technical optimizations are implemented regularly and predictably.