Sandqvist, a brand started back in 2004 by three childhood friends, really captures that Stockholm urban-meets-wilderness vibe. They're all about making everyday companions that work just as well on busy city streets as they do on rugged forest trails. Their design is classic Scandinavian: clear, balanced, and super functional. The digital side of things, though, started to struggle to tell their story and keep up as they grew.

Sandqvist's issue wasn't just about sales. As a brand that's really into sustainability—think organic cotton, recycled fibers, and vegetable-tanned leather—their website needed to be an awesome editorial space to share those values with customers worldwide. Unfortunately, by 2024, their old tech stack was seriously holding them back. They needed a major upgrade to get content and commerce playing nicely, making it easy to handle multiple markets for direct-to-consumer (DTC) and wholesale without slowing the site or making publishing a pain.

Sandqvist had to seriously upgrade its tech setup because it was growing way too fast for the old infrastructure. Their previous system was a fragmented, monolithic mess that made everything a huge pain to manage. Basically, they had separate, siloed tools for product info and brand stories, which meant the customer experience was disjointed, and they always had to call in outside developers for help.

Sandqvist store was built on Centra as its main e-commerce platform, with a WordPress-based CMS handling the content side. Both platforms were solid; their tight coupling or "monolithic-lite" integration led to several hurdles. Product details were in Centra, the cool editorial pieces and material stories lived in WordPress, and all the images were chilling in a totally separate external DAM system.

From a technical perspective, this fragmentation meant that even a minor UI change, such as adding a sustainability element to a Product Detail Page (PDP) or refreshing a seasonal collection story, usually required logging a developer ticket. Delivery times were all over the place, and the previous partner was basically just doing maintenance, meaning the site was constantly playing catch-up with technical issues instead of helping the brand move forward. Plus, the old site was weak on SEO; only 14% of it had structured data. And performance-wise, the Core Web Vitals were almost okay, which is just not good enough for a premium global brand.

They were stuck in a classic growth trap. Basically, the tech they thought would help them grow was holding them back. Their whole setup was getting bogged down, and the brand couldn't move fast enough to keep up with their 44 markets.

Sandqvist really needed a development partner who would own the results, plus a tech stack that could handle scaling without everyone drowning in extra work. ZCO, a boutique agency focused on a modern headless approach to creating digital experiences that matter.

ZCO’s rebuild is a textbook example of modern composable commerce; fast, flexible, and built for scale. The stack centers around Crystallize as the core PIM + CMS, paired with a performance-first frontend and specialized services for payments and search.

Core architecture:

• Crystallize → unified product (PIM) + editorial engine (CMS)
• Next.js (v15) + Vercel → high-performance frontend and global delivery
• Briqpay → made localized payments simple across 44 markets
• Meilisearch → ultra-fast onsite search with clever hybrid semantic capabilities
• You can check out the full tech stack ZCO used on Sandqvist right here.

Most commerce rebuilds promise performance gains and cleaner architecture. Few actually change how teams work.

Sandqvist’s challenge was familiar: a legacy setup in which the frontend and backend were tightly coupled, content and commerce lived in separate systems, and even small design changes required careful, often risky deployments. Over time, plugin dependencies piled up, making the system fragile and increasingly difficult to maintain.

The goal wasn’t just to modernize the stack. It was to remove friction; for developers, for editors, and ultimately for customers.

The solution was a composable architecture with Crystallize at its center, acting as both a Product Information Management system and a CMS. This wasn’t just a technical consolidation; it fundamentally changed how products were represented.

A product was no longer just a SKU with a price. It became a structured, content-rich entity that combined materials, storytelling, care instructions, and contextual data into a single model. That structure allowed the same piece of content to flow seamlessly across product pages, landing pages, and collections, without duplication or manual synchronization.

One of the most important changes didn’t come from technology alone. It came from how the team structured the work.

Instead of waiting for dependencies to clear, the team ran parallel workstreams. Content modeling progressed inside Crystallize while designers worked in Figma and developers built the frontend in Next.js. This decoupling allowed each discipline to move independently without blocking the others.

The result was a full migration and rebuild completed in just four months; a timeline that would be difficult to achieve in a traditional, tightly coupled setup.

Every project has its surprises. For the Sandqvist project, it surfaced in an area many teams underestimate: product listing and merchandising.

At first glance, ordering products on a listing page seems straightforward. In practice, it quickly becomes complex. Campaign priorities, editorial storytelling, seasonal shifts, and market-specific variations all compete for control over what appears where.

Standard database fields, like simple priority values, weren’t enough.

Instead of forcing the problem into existing constraints, the ZCO team extended the platform. They built a custom app directly inside Crystallize, a drag-and-drop interface that allowed business users to visually curate product listings.

Using Crystallize’s app framework and communication layer, this tool stayed fully integrated with the system without adding complexity to the storefront code. Editors gained control, developers avoided workarounds, and the architecture remained clean.

With the foundation in place, the focus shifted to performance, not as an optimization phase, but as a built-in characteristic. By leveraging React Server Components, the team moved heavy data-fetching logic from the browser to the server. This significantly reduced the amount of JavaScript sent to users, improving load times and responsiveness.

At the same time, Server Components combined with cache invalidation ensured that updates in Crystallize propagated globally almost instantly, without sacrificing the performance benefits of cached responses. Also, Crystallize’s APIs were designed to return only the data required for each page, keeping payload sizes minimal.

Together, these choices created a storefront that feels fast not just in benchmarks, but in real-world usage, especially on mobile, where performance directly influences conversion.

Two areas often treated as integrations, search and payments, became strategic advantages in this architecture.

Meilisearch enabled near-instant results with a combination of keyword and semantic search. This allowed customers to find products based on intent rather than exact matches. A query like “waterproof commute” could surface the right backpack even if those words weren’t explicitly present in the product title.

On the payment side, Briqpay simplified a traditionally complex layer. Instead of managing multiple providers and flows, Sandqvist could orchestrate payments through a single integration, dynamically adapting options based on context. High-value carts could surface “buy now, pay later” options, while the entire experience remained within the brand’s own interface.

For the Sandqvist, the transformation shifted the focus from fixing technology to growing the brand. The internal team estimated that the work that previously took days now takes hours. One stakeholder noted that the efficiency gain was "like our team size doubled," as marketers could now launch campaigns and update 44 markets independently of the dev team.

Managing 44 markets from one hub is no easy feat and a significant competitive advantage. Crystallize’s multi-market support allows for localized pricing and content overrides, while Briqpay ensures that a customer in Sweden sees Klarna and a customer in France sees Stripe, all through a single integration.

In premium fashion, site speed reflects brand quality. A slow website implies a lack of craftsmanship. By achieving sub-second load times and world-class Core Web Vitals, Sandqvist has reinforced its position as a high-end, design-led brand.

The new Sandqvist storefront turned out to be a massive win, delivering immediate, measurable improvements across the board as ZCO shared. The coolest part? They scaled to 44 markets and actually cut their ongoing tech costs by 9%! This debunked the myth that headless commerce is always more expensive.

Additionally, hooking up with Briqpay turned their checkout from a boring necessity into a total conversion machine. By handling local payments without messy iframes, Sandqvist kept its sleek design while offering the local trust and convenience people expect. This flexibility is huge for global growth, allowing them to test and swap payment providers in new regions without the development headaches.

But maybe the biggest change was how the team operates now. That old approach was replaced with a focused, discovery-led process that respects budgets and quality. Now, the team can really concentrate on telling Sandqvist’s amazing sustainability story (like their work with Chetna organic cotton in India), confident that the tech has their back and will make their message shine.

Sandqvist's whole digital transformation is a great example of shifting from a frustrating, maintenance-heavy setup to a growth engine focused on awesome experiences. They picked Crystallize as their semantic hub and Next.js for the frontend, essentially building a storytelling commerce platform that's just as high-quality and durable as their actual bags.

The numbers speak for themselves: they cut costs by 9%, doubled how fast they operate, and now have a seriously world-class performance profile supporting 44 markets.

In the competitive world of premium Scandinavian retail, Sandqvist basically set the new benchmark for how tech can help a brand grow globally while keeping its core vibe—simplicity, functionality, and sustainability—totally intact.

For developers and business leaders, the Sandqvist story is a perfect blueprint for how a composable architecture leads to calmer, more productive, and more profitable work.