Mattel augments Shopify’s scalable e-commerce with Contentstack’s enterprise-ready CMS capabilities for a dynamic cross-brand experience

Over the previous three years, Mattel has gone through a significant digital transformation, moving from a monolithic architecture to one based on microservices. As part of this transformation, Mattel was looking for a CMS that was able to help them drive the user experience, and support them in reusing content, no matter which platform or technology they were leveraging. “We wanted teams to be able to move faster,” Mark Hall, Senior Director, Digital Technology, Mattel, said. “We didn’t want to be locked into technology that only works a certain way. Part of this was adopting the microservice approach, as well as looking for a cloud-based solution so that it could scale to meet our needs.”

Mattel wanted a lean, lightweight CMS that was microservice-driven, and ultimately Contentstack stood out for its flexible and transparent pricing model. Rather than granularly watching usage, Mattel would be able to use Contentstack as much as necessary, without worrying about escalating costs. 

One specific challenge for Mattel was managing high-volume flash sales. “We would have to spin up a lot of technology servers to run sales, and yet almost every sale, we would crash,” Hall said. “We had to slow down the user journey to get through the sale without crashing. I remember my VP at the time gave us a challenge to get through the next sale without crashing. We had two weeks to make it happen.”

Mattel quickly spun up a sales website on Shopify, and was impressed by the scalable e-commerce ecosystem it provided. “Our first sale, we sold out within 13 minutes — and we didn’t crash!” Hall said. “However, this was without all of the bells and whistles of a digital ecosystem. We had a site, we had a product, but we didn’t have everything our business partners and content authors needed to manage content on the site.” 

Quickly, the business realized that it needed the best of both worlds — to be able to utilize the e-commerce power of Shopify to scale its retail capabilities, but also leverage enterprise-ready content management capabilities through Contentstack. This was especially crucial for the ability to reuse content across 15 markets —  10 in Europe and five across North and South America. “This didn’t scale in Shopify, so when we were rolling out Shopify for shop.mattel.com for example, we couldn’t have production teams copying and pasting everything 15 times,” Hall said. “Contentstack met the need as a place where content authors could go in, create content, and publish once to 15 different markets.”

Through the Shopify integration, there are now two types of content managed in Contentstack, serving content across three e-commerce websites: shop,mattel.com, creations.mattel.com, and americangirl.com. 

First, product information sourced from Mattel’s PIM, where all products are published to Contentstack alongside basic product information, and enriched to be tailored for the web experience. This could include creating web categories to decide how products are merchandised on the website, or extending Shopify’s out-of-the-box product schema using meta fields and additional data. Contentstack has become the mechanism for authoring and publishing to product attributes and fields within Shopify under their own schema, based on the objects that Shopify supports, from products and collections to pages and shop objects.

Secondly, Contentstack also manages non-product related content on Mattel’s e-commerce website, including banners and page content on the website to augment product listings and enhance the user experience.

Key wins for Mattel with Shopify and Contentstack include: 

• Daily flash sales: Mattel has gone from high-volume flash sales every few weeks to daily flash sales across multiple brands, without impacting customer experience. 

• Flexible content management: Business partners can now continually update, author and merchandise their content to suit their specific needs, with ultimate agility. 

• True future focus: With a microservice architecture, Mattel are not locked into any technology or vendor, and have the ability to scale seamlessly as they grow.