How Hirmer modernized its Oxid web shop with a headless frontend

The Munich family business Hirmer, with its three brands Hirmer, Hirmer Große Größen and Eckerle, has been regarded for three generations as Germany's premier address for menswear. At the Hirmer flagship store in the middle of Munich's pedestrian zone, everything revolves around men across 9,000 square meters and five floors, including a wedding service, made-to-measure tailoring and personal shopping. For men who need plus-size fashion, Hirmer operates 15 branches of its offshoot Hirmer Große Größen. And in the nine Eckerle branches, too, men find a rich selection of premium-quality business and casual menswear. Customers of the Hirmer and Eckerle branches are used to first-class service. The retailer wants to offer this customer experience in its online shops as well.

In developing the online shop further, however, there was one challenge. The tech stack that Hirmer's online shops are based on did run reliably and stably. But individual systems, and the frontend in particular, were so inflexible that extensions and new features could only be programmed with great effort. "We had various challenges, and our original wish was to replace everything," says Frederic Worm, Head of Shop Technology at Hirmer. "But if we had replaced the shop backend as well, we would have had a complete construction site from the ERP all the way to the front. The risk simply seemed too high to us. So we decided on a different path."

With support from its technology partners SHOPMACHER and Deutsche Daten Portal- und Plattformlösungen, Hirmer decided, as a first step toward modernization, to keep its existing Oxid backend and rebuild the frontend into headless using the frontend-as-a-service solution from Frontastic (now: commercetools Frontend). In addition, the developers implemented a modern PIM from ACL and a new order management solution from the company ACL.

In fact, the entire project was considerably more complex in its dependencies than originally expected. One example: the search solution Algolia can easily be connected via the control module from Frontastic, but only if Algolia is populated with the standard modules from commercetools. In Hirmer's case, however, the standard commercetools stack did not fit Hirmer's data format requirements at all. So the standard Frontastic solution was simply not usable for the retailer. Instead, a complete module had to be developed that talks to Algolia in the way Hirmer's data requires.

An important goal of the project was also to support Hirmer's internal developers in building up their own knowledge step by step, so they can continuously develop the online shop themselves in the future.

Those responsible at Hirmer do not regret their decision. Among other things, the Hirmer digital team takes a positive view of the fact that the shop's user experience improved almost by itself, even though there were originally no concrete specifications. Product lists and filters, for example, were reworked. Based on the new PIM combined with the headless frontend, online customers today can filter the ranges not just by color, brand, price or size, but, depending on the product category, have numerous different criteria available, such as collar shape or the number of buttons on the lapel.

In addition, the new headless solution allows not only the shop frontend to be rebuilt, but also other digital customer touchpoints. And that is exactly what the menswear retailer is planning, for example a frontend for loyalty card holders.

Finally, the traditional Munich retailer also hopes that, by switching to modern frontend technologies, it will find suitable employees more quickly, the kind who politely turn down outdated monoliths.