International headless webstore that makes design products shine

Muurla is a Finnish family business established in 1974 specialising in glass manufacturing. Within decades Muurla has evolved into a modern design house, where Finnish design and functionality are at the core of their wide range of products. Muurla strives to create products that combine high quality and functionality for the important moments of everyday life.

Muurla approached Contrast with the goal of increasing domestic and international e-commerce sales, as well as strengthening Muurla’s online presence. And above all else, shape the webstore into a matching backdrop for Muurla's beautiful products. In terms of functionality, the old webstore suffered from speed issues, a challenging site navigation, limited product search and campaign features, a difficult CMS, and an overall awkward shopping path, all of which had to be addressed in the new online store.

Contrast and Muurla sat down together in a foundation workshop, during which we explored Muurla’s business goals, market position and e-commerce strategy, and dove deeper into their most important buyer groups. Using this information, we created a structured plan for the implementation of the online store, which would include technical architecture, visual designs, a new purchase path and overhauled visual guidelines. The online store was to be implemented with a mobile first approach and accessibility standards in mind.

The result is an elegant, headless online store that offers end users an excellent shopping experience on any device. A wide selection of modular blocks offers Muurla the freedom to present campaigns, collections and new products in an attractive and flexible way. A special feature is the tailor-made visual product module, where buyers can browse inspiring product shots, pick up ideas for their home and, if they wish, buy a product straight from the image. 

To facilitate product discovery, we further customised an intelligent, real-time product search using Algolia’s search engine solution, which predicts user inputs, flawlessly handles typing errors, and presents results based on their relevance.

Muurla’s new webstore was implemented using a headless approach, in which a stand-alone frontend and backend system communicate via API. This approach not only massively increases the site’s speed performance, but gives maximum flexibility to customise the online store and integrate it with other systems. In addition, a big advantage of the detached frontend is that the underlying CMS platform can be switched at any point in the future. The basis of the current implementation is WordPress combined with Woocommerce's e-commerce platform.