Envie de Fraise: a new e-commerce platform on Sylius

Since 2006, the Envie de Fraise brand has been revolutionizing maternity fashion with “sustainable and desirable” ready-to-wear for pregnant women and new moms. In 2017, it joined the Rosa group alongside the Linvosges and Françoise Saget brands. As part of a global e-commerce replatforming project, the group then decided to migrate all of its brands to Sylius. The goal? Provide a shared technical foundation for the three brands, support their digital growth and foster cross-brand momentum for all users. Synolia, an expert and leading French partner for the Sylius solution, was selected to carry the e-commerce replatforming project through to completion, starting with Envie de Fraise.

Envie de Fraise: a necessary replatforming to meet the expectations of pregnant women and new moms

Since 2017, the Rosa group has brought together Linvosges and Françoise Saget (two long-established mail-order brands) and Envie de Fraise, a digital pure player. The brands target very different audiences but share the same digital growth challenges. To meet them, the group wanted to equip itself with the right tools…

In 2019, it launched a major e-commerce replatforming project. With Synolia’s consulting support, it identified the solution offering the best functional coverage for all three brands: Sylius.

The youngest brand in the Rosa group, Envie de Fraise is dedicated to fashion for pregnant women and new moms. It is also the most digitally mature of the group’s three brands. But over time, Envie de Fraise had built up significant technical debt on its Prestashop solution. The site was aging, and every small change required considerable development time from the technical teams. That took a real toll on the business teams and on the business momentum the brand was aiming for…

What Envie de Fraise expected

A Sylius expert to implement the solution within the brand and help our teams become self-sufficient with the tool.

Following our consulting engagement, Envie de Fraise’s leadership team launched a tender to find an experienced Sylius integrator. They were also looking for a partner able to help business teams use the tool independently, and able to train the development teams to master it technically.

Synolia x Sylius

Synolia naturally responded to the tender for implementing Sylius at Envie de Fraise. And at the end of 2019, we were selected!

Our services for Envie de Fraise (after our consulting engagement): preparatory workshops, organizational and functional scoping, Sylius technical architecture, front-end support on REACT / Gatsby, co-development (agile method), user training.

Technology at the service of the business

Sylius addresses both the shared needs (about 80%) and the specific needs of the Rosa group’s three brands. It is a flexible solution that can adapt without limits. A lightweight solution, with just the essentials, plus the option of custom development without hindering the platform’s ability to evolve. With Sylius, site speed and control over Core Web Vitals guarantee smooth browsing for customers. And for the teams, time to market is dramatically shorter.

Agility that stood every test

Launched in early 2020, the migration project was shaken up by the arrival of COVID-19, turnover in the brand’s leadership team and major scope changes to the platform architecture. The Envie de Fraise teams were also implementing a new DAM and a new ERP in agile mode, in parallel with the migration project with Synolia x Sylius. These large, interdependent workstreams sometimes affected the Sylius technical architecture. Running so many projects at once was a major organizational and human challenge for the stakeholders at Envie de Fraise. But Synolia, and in particular Olivier Allain, web architect and Sylius expert, was there to support them and adapt the project with agility.

Empowering business teams

For Envie de Fraise, choosing the Sylius e-commerce platform fully meets its goals of making business teams (product, marketing, customer service…) self-sufficient and building up the technical teams’ skills. The “headless” and “best-of-breed” approach of Sylius also lets the solution fade into the background behind many connected tools and services, each useful to a specific business team.
The Prismic CMS for content creation and menu management, Akeneo PIM for products, the Bynder DAM for asset management, Algolia for merchandising, Actito for CRM… As a result, some forty employees can create, edit, schedule and publish actions through these tools and services, without touching Sylius or calling on a developer.

Results

Since the new platform went live in May 2022, business teams have gained real autonomy and time whenever they want to roll out new actions (creating pages and sections, preparing sales…). Technical teams receive fewer requests and can focus their efforts on optimization, new features and web performance. On the business side, the leadership team is already seeing the first positive effects on the site’s visitor conversion rate. And, reassured by the successful launch of the new platform, it is now defining concrete, ambitious goals for the months ahead.

Finally, the Linvosges and Françoise Saget brands will be able to migrate to Sylius in turn, with confidence, alongside Synolia. They will benefit from all the logic and interfaces successfully implemented for Envie de Fraise.

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