Gusti Leder

Gusti Leder was founded in 2009 by Christian Pietsch. The company sells leather goods via its international online shop and stationary shops. In addition to high product quality, the company places great importance on offering their end consumers transparency in the development processes. Gusti Leder buys its goods directly from the producer and does so without cost-intensive intermediate trade.

Shopware is "the place to be" for Gusti Leder

"Just as I know all the producers of my leather goods and have a long relationship with them, it is important that I know people who develop the core of my shop software. This is possible with Shopware. Shopware is open, and we have a direct contact person in the team who we can address with any questions," describes Christian Pietsch, CEO of Gusti Leder, on why he is satisfied with the decision to migrate his online shop from Magento to Shopware.

Looking back: prior to migrating to Shopware, Gusti Leder used Magento 1 as the basis for their online shop. The company was then faced with the decision to switch to either Magento 2 or Shopware. The decision was made in favour of Shopware: on the one hand, due to better mobile responsiveness and on the other, due to the network. "Shopware is the place to be for us. We were able speak with other large online retailers about topics of importance to us. The community supports each other, which is why our learning curve increased dramatically with Shopware. In addition, Shopware’s documentation helps enormously; all you have to do is a quick search on Google to get the help you need,” explains Pietsch.

Time-to-market in only two months

For the relaunch of the new online shop, which includes ten country shops, the Gusti Leder team set an ambitious implementation window of only two months. The team started with the two smallest shops, Austria and Switzerland. The last step was the migration of the largest shop, the German shop.

"We imported all products, descriptions, variants and orders with CSV files via Shopware’s Import/Export module. We imported the media and product images via the Shopware API", says Timo Himstedt, IT Manager at Gusti Leder, summarising the relaunch workflow.

Reduction of agency costs

"The biggest difference between our previous shop system and Shopware is that we can do basically everything on our own. Up until now we were very agency dependent, because the Magento core was very complicated. Now when someone from our team has a good idea for our online shop, we can quickly implement it with our own development team. That's really perfect; that's the way it should be," explains Pietsch. "We have the option of using an agency, but we are no longer dependent on it at every step - that is a huge advantage for us," Pietsch continues.

In the beginning phases of a complex project implementation, things don't always go as planned when developing in-house. Gusti Leder faced an issue when the shop went offline. "That made us sweat a lot, because we didn't know what it was all about. But then we had a conference call with our Shopware support. The shop was live again soon. This situation was a great experience for us, because we received direct help immediately," says Pietsch.

International sales made easy

In addition to the online shop, Gusti Leder also runs stationary stores in Hamburg, Berlin and Rostock. An additional shop in Munich is also under construction. But international sales are also an important success factor for the company, on which great focus is placed. Gusti Leder already sells its products through nine subshops in countries including France, Italy and Great Britain. Niche markets such as Denmark, Sweden or Greece are also particularly interesting for their expansion. "Magento made it very difficult for us to open new subshops. Through the relaunch with Shopware, we can now quickly launch new subshops for selling abroad. There are already several plugins that allow us to localise and translate the shop, so we only have to add the product descriptions," says Pietsch.

Simple and inexpensive customisation

Gusti Leder produces affordable leather goods, which means that the company makes a good deal of its income through additional services, namely through product customisation. For example, customers can personalise their products with engraving when ordering.

"In the past, we invested 20,000€ in personalisation alone. With Shopware, we simply installed the plugin Custom Products and that was it. Our development team can adapt the plugin individually to our website," says Pietsch.

Mobile responsiveness leads to an increased conversion rate

Besides the fact that the Gusti Leder team can now save considerable costs and develop their shop flexibly and independently, the success of the migration is also reflected in the figures. The conversion rate has improved in France and Switzerland, and especially the conversion rate via mobile devices has increased significantly. "The mobile usability is much more intuitive with Shopware. We are sure that the increase in sales can be attributed to that," says Pietsch.

New resources created for redesign

Due to the fact that Gusti Leder can save agency costs, customisation costs and resources for ticket systems, the company is now considering a complete redesign of the website.