M.Gemi Speeds Up Its Storefront and Pays Down Tech Debt

“We wanted it not to feel like an agency relationship.”

Cheryl Kaplan

CEO at M.Gemi

Impact

$15K Monthly Savings

The projected cost savings for M.Gemi's site maintenance and development resources is close to $15,000 a month.

6-Week Italy Launch

With Anatta’s help, M.Gemi is expected to be live across Italy in just 6 weeks.

M.Gemi partnered with Anatta during the summer of 2021 to optimize their site speed, reduce tech debt, and enhance their storefront's user experience.

What we did for them

Web Page Speed
Redesign
Shopify Plus migration
Apps/Extensions/Plugins
Desktop UX
Mobile UX
Custom Prismic CMS Integration
Qualitative testing & improvements
Tech stack strategy
Heuristics & Implementation
International Launch
Loyalty Program

M.Gemi & Anatta

Success in collaboration

Founded in 2014, M.Gemi has been making a name for itself as a luxury fashion brand that offers high-quality and sustainable footwear..

Since its founding, M.Gemi has maintained a heavily customized eCommerce site, relying on third-party applications for core functions.

From a technology perspective, our business has had three phases. The first phase was heavy technology, where we had a technology team building customized platforms, and leveraging third-party software that was knitted together in a very customized fashion. And that started in 2014.

Ted McNamara

CFO at M.Gemi

Phase two, as Shopify developed more and more functionality and had the capability to handle where we wanted to go as a business, both from a growth perspective and multichannel, we felt like Shopify was a good place to use as the base platform and customize around it. In phase two, we had a smaller tech team. And that team implemented a heavily customized Shopify instance.

Ted McNamara

CFO at M.Gemi

Because of the complexity of M.Gemi’s website, M.Gemi has always needed a dedicated development team to help maintain their online store, and build out new features. But when the pandemic began in 2020, a dedicated internal tech team was no longer possible. And M.Gemi needed the space and capacity to focus on high-priority needs without worrying about their site.

When COVID hit in 2020, we were forced to do a bunch of things. The first thing was, because of the product category we're in, luxury footwear, there wasn't a big demand in the U.S. for people to buy new pretty shoes to go nowhere. So our business suffered dramatically from a demand perspective. We were forced to cut costs everywhere.

Ted McNamara

CFO at M.Gemi

With the level of customization involved with the M.Gemi site, M.Gemi knew they needed a reliable, experienced partner who could own the tech side of their business – and also help them make decisions on the best path forward.

By 2021, finding an expert tech partner became a top priority.

We found ourselves in phase three, which was, ‘How do we simplify the business without doing additional customization?’ One of the big bull's eyes for us was a three to five-person tech team, so outsourcing became a very viable path. And that’s how we met Anatta.

Ted McNamara

CFO at M.Gemi

2021 · Q3
2022 · Q1
2022 · Q4
2023 · Q2

2021 · Q3

Anatta was onboarded as M.Gemi’s outsourced tech partner in Q3 of 2021. M.Gemi teamed up with a dedicated UI Developer, App Engineer, and QA resource. Anatta immediately led with site audits, looking for ways to optimize M.Gemi’s site performance and simplify its tech stack.

Anatta’s first goal was decluttering M.Gemi’s tech stack. Not only to improve site performance and speed but to streamline the site’s front and back-end for effortless scalability. M.Gemi’s site was already highly-custom, so both teams agreed that simplification would be the first concern before new store features were implemented.

During this process, M.Gemi was able to lean on Anatta’s senior leadership for guidance.

2022 · Q1

Over the course of 2022, Anatta continued simplifying M.Gemi’s back-end code. A big win was Anatta’s implementation of a Prismic CMS integration that would allow M.Gemi to easily spin out new landing pages and content. All without the need for a single Dev resource.

We've been able to leverage different skill sets than we had in-house when it was purely a development team. We've been able to leverage strategic resources, research resources, and design resources.

The Anatta partnership model is like having a broader team.

Cheryl Kaplan

CEO at M.Gemi

2022 · Q4

During Q4 of 2022, however, M.Gemi faced a tech fire that had been gradually building for seven years. The company's Looker BI tool, which processed years of data and hundreds of custom queries, became overwhelmed and caused disruptions across the entire M.Gemi website. To address the issue, M.Gemi enlisted Anatta to swiftly develop a permanent solution.

M.Gemi has been in business since 2014. By the time the Anatta and M.Gemi partnership began, their dataset had gotten so large, that the demand on everything was just more than the system could handle. M.Gemi wasn’t able to get proper financials for returns or things like month-over-month, year-over-year… Everyone saw that the efforts and time would be better spent on fixing all of the back-end dependencies and removing those as necessary so that M.Gemi could achieve more efficient reporting and lower costs overall.

Gabe Webb

Project Manager at Anatta

Anatta got to work right away. And with all hands on deck, turned over a solution that stabilized M.Gemi’s data analytics and made the process cost-effective. Now, future maintenance of the tool won’t be needed from M.Gemi’s end.

When you're pitched by an agency, you get to know them a little, and everything's good. And you don't really talk about what happens when it's not good. And whether it was a technical issue or something that hasn’t gone as planned along the way, I’ve felt very heard. I felt like the response was really quick in terms of making a change where necessary. And I think that's important. Because anyone could be good on a good day, but the team has been, especially at the senior leadership level, really responsive. They want us to be happy, they want it to work. And when they think we're not happy, they're not happy.

The Anatta team always wants to figure out how to make the partnership better.

Cheryl Kaplan

CEO at M.Gemi

In past lives, we would have gone out and done a lot of research. I'd be at conferences, I'd be talking to my peers and our peers at different companies and, you know, kind of heading down a direction and hoping it's right. Having experts who are working with different configurations and know what works, what doesn't, and understand what third-party software works best for our situation, rather than us, sort of guessing—that's been a big value for us.

Ted McNamara

CFO at M.Gemi

2023 · Q2

To wrap up Q2 2023, Anatta oversaw M.Gemi’s international launch into Italy’s eCommerce markets. With Anatta’s help, M.Gemi is expected to be live across Italy in just 6 weeks.

Looking forward...

Anatta and M.Gemi will continue their partnership through 2023. Anatta’s primary goals for the year will focus on reducing M.Gemi's need for development resources, as well as cutting down long-term tech maintenance costs.

The projected cost savings for M.Gemi's site maintenance and development resources is close to $15,000 a month.

Anatta also has sights set on building out M.Gemi’s Loyalty Program, redesigning M.Gemi's homepage and PLPs for higher conversions, and much more.

There are so many agencies out there. And a lot of them are talented. But I think one of the big things comes down to: can you work well together? When things are good, great. But when they're not? How are you going to figure things out and come out of it? And I think we learned that about each other through very open and honest dialogue.

Cheryl Kaplan

CEO at M.Gemi

Anatta is someone that you can lean on to help—not just kind of do stuff, but diagnose issues and think about the future. Which is a different level of partnership than just the traditional outsourcing of engineering talent.

Ted McNamara

CFO at M.Gemi

M.Gemi Speeds Up Its Storefront and Pays Down Tech Debt

Impact

What we did for them

Success in collaboration

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