Rituals
Namasté: the transition from a monolith architecture to a flexible MACH solution
For the past decade, Emakina has been a partner to Rituals, working together to expand their digital channels and driving growth in their online business. The time came to build a more agile, scalable, and flexible architecture that better serves the needs of the business and its customers. We set off on a journey of transitioning Rituals from a monolith architecture to a composable MACH approach.
Our solution
We were faced with two main questions when helping Rituals with their online channel transition: why headless, and which transition model to take. After careful consideration, we determined that a headless architecture would provide the flexibility, scalability and performance needed to increase sales, improve system maintenance and enhance their content.
The transition model was more challenging to determine as Rituals continuously releases new products, so can’t afford to have a platform freeze. The client wanted to involve existing development teams with knowledge of their working approach and content-heavy strategy. To meet these requirements, we implemented a hybrid transition that mixed old and new technology in one customer experience, phasing out the old technology over time. This approach reduces risk and ensures that any potential slowdown would not impact direct sales.
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Migrating such a vast digital ecosystem must be meticulously plotted. In the case of Rituals, we are transitioning from a Salesforce-based architecture to a composable MACH architecture. Rituals provided us with several key requirements for their online channel transition, including market insights into composable development and new designs for the Namasté product line.
Our team created brand-new product detail pages (PDPs) for Rituals' Namasté product line, built in React using the Progressive Web App (PWA) Kit from Salesforce. This kit provides a headless solution for B2C Commerce shoppers with benefits including enhanced flexibility, quick time to value and trust and scale. We also created the Talisman quiz – an interactive fragrance finder. Contentful was implemented as a content management system (CMS) and Elastic Search as the search microservice for assets. Salesforce Commerce API (SCAPI) – a new microservice API from Salesforce – was used to fast-track the implementation of headless architecture and provides the requisite flexibility and scalability to engage in contextual commerce.
A new component library will make it easy to assemble new product lines in the future. Contentful, as a headless CMS, simplifies omnichannel content publication. It’s designed to improve the quality and consistency of published content, to cut down on repetitive work and to turn content publication into a user-focused operation. Content editors can continue to use PageDesigner – the Salesforce Commerce Cloud template editing feature – outside the channels it was designed for.
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The results
This project boasts many success stories that showcase our strategic expertise of headless and transition models as well as technical innovation. Emakina and Rituals were one of the first in the world to implement the PWA Kit on such a large global scale. The Rituals product line Namasté was delivered using pure MACH architecture, mixed right into existing Salesforce-hosted web shops. The result is a set of 47 new PDPs with stunning artwork and full integration with other pages based on SiteGenesis. These improvements provide a seamless and enjoyable online shopping experience for Rituals' customers. We will continue to transition the full website to MACH architecture.