New Flag Generates 50% of Revenue from Online Channels with AWS Partner Spryker

New Flag is a multinational brand building enterprise headquartered in Munich, Germany, with one goal: to be the first full-service brand building company in the beauty industry in Europe. Beyond just beauty products, New Flag aims to elevate everyday experiences and disrupt the industry through digital innovation.

Adapting to market changes, New Flag launched an online store to test the potential of ecommerce for its business. While this initial setup suggested that ecommerce was a good step forward, New Flag encountered challenges when it tried to expand its ecommerce portfolio across multiple brands and territories. This included data inconsistencies and inefficient data flows across its online platforms and backend systems that made it difficult to manage its product cohesively.

As a distributor, New Flag was aware that the traditional ecommerce functionalities typically found in B2C stores wouldn't adequately serve the needs of haircare professionals. These consumers have unique requirements such as restricted access to certain assortments and prices, the ability to switch between gross and net prices, individualized or group-specific pricing based on negotiated deals, and complex volume and cart discounts with detailed rules and restrictions. These specialized use cases necessitate a more tailored and robust ecommerce solution that effectively caters to a professional clientele. To address these gaps, New Flag sought a modular and adaptable software solution and technology stack that could scale with its international digital vision.

New Flag worked with AWS ISV Workload Migration Partner (WMP) Spryker. Leveraging AWS, Spryker delivers tailored cloud-based ecommerce solutions effectively and securely. In New Flag’s case, Spryker’s API-first approach, headless commerce architecture with advanced features, and marketplace integration enabled New Flag to develop a sophisticated ecommerce platform of its own—one designed to handle its extensive range of beauty and hair products and the requirements for haircare professionals. “Spryker’s out-of-the-box features were good and easy to customize to our needs,” says Maximilian Mauthe, director of product at New Flag.

Spanning 105 availability zones within 33 geographic regions, AWS empowers New Flag to serve customers quickly and reliably. The New Flag platform utilizes several services and products from AWS. For starters, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) gives New Flag the flexibility, speed, and scalability to create and customize new databases in just minutes. For back-end computing, New Flag relies on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Additional AWS services include Amazon Application Load Balancer, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Amazon CodePipeline. The latter service uses an automated continuous delivery pipeline for fast and reliable updates in the system.

“Spryker’s scalable architecture has given us the power and speed to launch within new markets in just a month—and with less resources,” explains Mauthe. Launching easily in several markets has been key for the expansion of New Flag’s professional stores. Additionally, Spryker’s B2B cloud-based commerce platform streamlines technology operations. The decoupled front-end and back-end architecture of Spryker's composable technology enables change management across all levels of the stack, making it easy to address business and operational challenges efficiently.

New Flag’s new streamlined operations have empowered employees with the visibility they need to elevate customer service. “Classic sales reps are the backbone of the company, and we need to give them the opportunity to link online and offline, not only to provide visibility on the orders but to see purchase history and engage better with customers,” says Nadine Wachter, director of ecommerce and performance marketing at New Flag.

The new benefits have been at the forefront including 50% of revenue generated through online channels thanks to 100% of B2B orders being process through Spryker. This enhanced B2B customer experience has come with tailored capabilities to provide an enhancement throughout the processes.

Establishing a robust foundation for global expansion with comprehensive data management, B2B capabilities, and seamless transaction processing has been a significant leap forward for New Flag. While nearly half of New Flag's revenue is now generated through online channels, this milestone marks only the beginning of its leadership in the professional haircare vertical.