HUNTER & stylecats®: Success with 2 shops, Shopify Plus and headless commerce

HUNTER is one of the leading brands in the pet sector and sells products such as dog leads, collars, dog beds, treats and other accessories. Bielefeld is not only home to the company's own leather factory, but also the HUNTER retail store.

Another important part of the HUNTER family is the stylecats® brand, which - as the name suggests - is all about the well-being of cats and their owners. In addition to cat furniture such as scratching posts and scratching walls, customers can also find accessories such as bowls and toys in the shop.

Latori supported HUNTER with the switch from Shopware to Shopify Plus and developed the online shops for wirliebenhunter.de and stylecats®.de. Nicole Springer, Online Shop Manager at HUNTER, told us in an interview what challenges the company faced, how the collaboration with Latori went and what results have been achieved since then.

According to Nicole, the change has already paid off:

"Customers are extremely satisfied, as the positive reviews on Trustpilot show. They appreciate the user-friendly and clear design of the shop. Particularly popular is the option to create create your own pet as a profile. Users not only enjoy a pleasant shopping pleasant shopping experience, but also benefit from a wealth of valuable valuable information that enriches the content. Also popular is the comment function in our magazine. There, customers have the opportunity to exchange ideas and receive tips directly from us."

At a glance - this is how the project was put together:

• Migration from Shopware to Shopify Plus

• Design implementation and customisation

• Migration of orders, customers, vouchers and discount codes

• Realisation of multilingualism

• Headless commerce with Shopify Hydrogen

• Design of 2 storefronts with a shared backend

• Programming a customised Shopify app for animal profiles

• Programming of configurators for product personalisation

• Connection of magazine area for wirliebenhunter.de and stylecats.de respectively

• Connection of the newsletter tool Brevo

The HUNTER company

Values and commitment

The traditional company HUNTER attaches great importance to quality. The high-quality leather accessories for dogs and people are made by hand in the company's own factory in Bielefeld.

"Tradition is a very important topic for us as a family business, and the welfare of the dogs and cats is of course our top priority," says Nicole.

However, it is not just the welfare of dogs and cats that is at the top of the list of priorities, special attention is also paid to sustainability.

For this reason, the company works together with the sustainability platform "Greenspark". With the help of its own sustainability programme in the online shop, trees are planted, plastic bottles are removed from the sea and CO2 emissions are reduced, depending on the customer's purchase. In this way, 126.364 trees have been planted so far, 5.486.192 tonnes of CO2 have been offset and 251.503 plastic bottles have been saved. Shipping is of course climate-neutral.

These measures demonstrate Hunter's commitment to a greener future and are presented transparently to customers during the checkout process.

Sales and marketing

In addition to the two online stores and the company's own retail store in Bielefeld, HUNTER fans worldwide have the opportunity to experience the products in well-stocked bricks-and-mortar stores. HUNTER B2B customers range from small, exclusive boutiques to large chains, such as Fressnapf, to over 30 HUNTER Brand Stores, which are set up and enthusiastically run by enthusiastic HUNTER partners all over the world. For example, HUNTER shops can be found in numerous European countries, as well as in Japan, China, Peru and the Ivory Coast.

The initial situation - why a change from Shopware was necessary

Before HUNTER approached us, there were already two online shops for HUNTER and stylecats® selling on Shopware 5. As the support ended here, the company was faced with a decision: update to Shopware 6 or switch to a completely different shop system? As the brand had already faced a number of challenges while using Shopware, including a high cost factor, high labour costs and the need for programmers, the decision was made to migrate to Shopify Plus. Nicole summarises it like this:

"After a few meetings, we finally thought about what we should do. Then Shopify Plus came up. In principle, it was the entire concept that convinced us of Shopify Plus."Reading tip: Shopware vs Shopify - we take a close look at both shop systems.

With the right partner at your side: why Latori was chosen

Once it was clear that the migration to Shopify Plus was to take place, the search began for a suitable partner agency to ensure a smooth transition. When HUNTER contacted Shopify for this, Shopify recommended Latori.

HUNTER then contacted us to discuss the project. As the discussions were positive and the company liked the concept presented by Latori, the decision was finally made in favour of a joint collaboration.

The implementation - how we realised the migration

As part of the migration, all data such as orders, customers, vouchers and discount codes were transferred to the new shop. The design provided by HUNTER was then implemented and customised to meet the brand's requirements. We also implemented multilingualism in the shop and integrated the Brevo newsletter tool and other apps.

"Latori and Shopify Plus have managed to come extremely close to the original design. We were really pleasantly surprised that it worked as we had imagined. We were also happy with the speed of implementation. We got in touch in February 2023, the project started in May and we were already live in October. That was outstandingly good," says Nicole.

Headless Commerce with Shopify Hydrogen

Thanks to the use of Headless Commerce with Shopify Hydrogen, two storefronts could be created for the two shops. The shops share the Shopify backend. Nicole tells us why the decision was made in favour of a headless architecture:

"It became clear relatively quickly that we would rely on headless, partly because we wanted to connect an own HUNTER-app later, have our own themes and have a bit more flexibility. We already have a lot of special features that wouldn't work without Headless."

Hydrogen is based on Remix and has been optimised so that it integrates seamlessly into the Oxygen hosting platform from Shopify. In order to be able to implement two websites with the same backend, both shops had to be stored as one online shop in the ERP system. This means that all customer data, orders and products from both the stylecats® and HUNTER stores run in the same ERP system. In principle, two brand websites were created for stylecats® and HUNTER, which run together in the ERP system under the umbrella of House of Pet Design.

Storyblok was used as the content management system. Here, too, we implemented customised configurations that ensure that created content is also loaded as a resource via Hydrogen. This means that nothing has to be created asynchronously.

Two shops - one checkout

The biggest highlight of both shops is that they share a shopping basket and checkout. This allows customers to switch seamlessly between the two shops and synchronise the products. This would not have been possible without a headless storefront and is made possible by the fact that a session is always opened for both shops.

Cookie sharing is also an issue that we implemented. This was a challenge, as it is usually not possible to manage this information across domains. However, Latori was able to create a solution here with multi-domain content. Front-end developer Schemek Krysciak summarises it like this:

"Cookie sharing was complex in the sense that it is not technically possible to simply go and set any information under a different domain. In other words, we had to find solutions that would still allow cookies to be stored on another domain. The more domains, the more complex the whole thing becomes."

Creating personal experiences with customisation

Another special feature of the project was the configuration of the Shopify app, which allows customers to create animal profiles. A product configurator was also implemented so that customers can personalise their products. This was custom-programmed by Latori. The tricky part here was the backend part, as we had to split the orders - if a customer buys a personalised product and a normal product, the order has to be split.

The following was implemented for product personalisation:

• Programming and visualisation of personalised products in the PDP (engraving of collars).

• Personalised items are split (e.g. if the customer buys 2 products - the shipping costs remain in the first order)

• Production employees get a picture of what the customer is sending in the order

• Preview, as well as attaching the image to the order item, is programmed purely in Shopify without third-party software

We also implemented the Wishlist Plus app so that customers can create wish lists in the shops. This enables custom integration with API keys, which allows us to implement it in the headless frontend.

Project Manager Darja Fodor summarises the project as follows:

"Working on this project showed me how important communication, teamwork and adaptability are to successfully achieving project goals and outcomes. The scope of the project and the tight deadline forced us to work hand in hand with everyone involved. It was an exciting and challenging journey, but the end result was worth it!"

Nicole summarised the collaboration between our agency and HUNTER in a similar way:

"I think projects like the split shopping basket were also a new challenge for Latori and they really mastered it very well. We are definitely satisfied with Latori."

The future of HUNTER and stylecats®: What has changed since the migration and what is planned?

• Increased visibility of the stylecats® brand thanks to the presence of wirliebenhunter.de

• Well over 2000 registered new customers

• Over 23,000 orders

• Over 655,000 online sessions

In the future, HUNTER plans to implement a bundle function, for example, so that customers can purchase a collar and lead, dummy food bag and snacks or puppy packs. A loyalty programme is also to be introduced so that customers can collect loyalty points with every order and then convert these into rewards. Internationalisation with Shopify is also to be further expanded and additional languages integrated. In addition, customers will be able to use a mobile app in the future.

In addition, the stylecats® brand is being expanded for the B2B business and will be delivered to authorised specialist retailers worldwide. Until now, there was only an online shop and a dedicated shop in Hanover.

We would like to thank Nicole Springer for the interview and look forward to continuing our good co-operation.