Migrating a legacy toy brand from Magento to Shopify
Schleich approached Domaine to replatform its North American sites from Magento to Shopify and simultaneously refresh its approach to direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce. The new website now enables rapid deployment, AI capabilities, and theme flexibility that is customized for their unique needs.
The Domaine team created a universal theme for all of Schleich’s regional expansion stores. This has become a go-to move for the Domaine team when tackling projects for global brands with a vast, detailed product range. The approach allows the Schleich team to toggle features on and off for their Canadian, American, DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) and French, United Kingdom, and ‘rest-of-the-world’ sites, supporting multi-language, and easily allows them to roll into new markets with different currencies.
Schleich’s products are meticulously organized into different categories, allowing shoppers to browse for toys not only within product categories but also by themes such as ‘Farm World’. Migrating this deep categorization to Shopify required the Domaine team to take a unique approach with Shopify tags, adding custom theme features to allow customers to filter product. A naming convention was implemented to achieve this, with specific tags used to identity product types so that customers can narrow down product that meets a specific criteria.
Custom integrations were developed for Schleich’s loyalty program on Yotpo and their newsletter program on Klaviyo. The Domaine team worked hard to ensure the Schleich sites’ compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy measures. Creating an account with the brand and signing up for its loyalty program needed to be age-gated at 18+, so the team developed a custom feature allowing customers to confirm their age.
The brand’s vast directory of product features and functionality are managed by their team in a library of CSV files. The Domaine team created a custom solution so that they could continue to do mass updates on their content, by adapting the new sites’ Shopify metafields to replicate the functionality of this library. The team can now download a CSV of their product content, update relevant data points, and re-upload to Shopify for the system to automatically update the relevant products, making it much easier for the team to self-perform mass updates for product descriptions or even pricing in the event of sales.
The platform migration also allowed Schleich to use Shopify’s Markets feature and launch stores in seven additional countries with only two additional expansion stores for international marketing campaigns. Domaine helped build these instances for Germany and Spain, both being multi-lingual to access customers in a total of six languages. This powerful tool allows Schleich to build their global audience and scale at a new level.
This migration involved a close collaboration with the Schleich team during scoping and discovery, diving deeply to understand their business, creating diagrams of their order flow, and breaking down their existing sites in a granular way, given the multi-faceted nature of the brand’s worldwide presence. The Domaine team rebuilt their backend flow within Shopify in a mere few days, a project that was forecasted to last at least four months on the Magento platform. The final result is two new Shopify sites built with theme flexibility, customized for their products and processes. The Domaine team is now working on the next phase of the project, developing stronger personalization tools through machine learning.
