Building a Unified Content Commerce Experience with Magnolia

As a leading company in the home and living industry, Villeroy & Boch faced significant technical and business problems. The company's digital presence was fragmented across multiple outdated platforms. The “Dining & Lifestyle” business unit, which is B2C, was supported by 16 separate e-commerce shops on a legacy SFCC SFRA basis. Meanwhile, the “Bath & Wellness” and “Living” segments were commercialized in B2B via partner shops, with product information and catalogs residing on 33 end-consumer websites built on a legacy Typo3 platform. This made it difficult to achieve their goal of providing a seamless customer experience, as different business units had disparate design aesthetics and inconsistent structures. The lack of a flexible, state-of-the-art CMS made it hard to create engaging, consistent content and led to a disjointed customer journey.

Villeroy & Boch chose Magnolia to create a unified, holistic platform strategy known as SHORPORATE, which merges their shop and corporate sites. The deciding factors were Magnolia's flexibility and its headless, composable architecture, which allowed them to select the best-of-breed tools for their platform.

The solution: a composable commerce setup, with Magnolia serving as the central CMS and SFCC handling the e-commerce functionalities – implemented by Magnolia platinum partner dotSource. Magnolia’s headless approach enabled a clear separation of content from the front-end, allowing the Salesforce Composable Storefront to retrieve product data from SFCC while drawing on Magnolia to enrich product pages with high-quality content. This empowered the content team to create richer, more informative product pages and better storytelling experiences.

The new Magnolia-powered platform delivered significant, measurable outcomes. The seamless integration of content and commerce eliminated the technical distinction between shopable and non-shopable products, allowing for a more fluid customer experience. A key business benefit was the ability to manage content for both B2C and B2B products within a single system, streamlining operations and ensuring brand consistency. The implementation resulted in better performance, faster page load times, and simplified workflows for the content team, which in turn contributed to increased customer satisfaction and more conversions.

The shift to a single, unified platform dramatically accelerated their go-to-market timeline, with 33 websites launched in just six months. This rapid global rollout demonstrates the agility and scalability gained with a modern, composable architecture.