MissPompadour: paintwork expert

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Operating predominantly in the D2C sector, MissPompadour sells premium-quality, sustainable paints for interiors and exteriors throughout Europe, enabling customers to remodel their own homes.
At MissPompadour, DIY enthusiasts can get all the tools and instructions they need to spruce up their homes in a range of colors. The MissPompadour website includes a project assistant to help customers select the right paints and accessories. MissPompadour is all about turning old into new. Whether old bathroom tiles or dull kitchen units – modern MissPompadour paints can give them a whole new lease of life. In today’s consumer society, the paint experts are firm believers in upcycling.

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MissPompadour’s customers can choose between a range of different paint types and product sizes, with around 10 to 15 variants per paint. The range also includes decorating accessories plus primers and sealers, which means that MissPompadour currently offers customers just under 4,000 products in around 50 categories in its online store. The paints are arranged in different categories, based, for example, on paint type, color, brand and the material to be painted. New categories such as mood, impact and home style should make selecting paints even easier for MissPompadour customers.

The challenge

Due its diverse range and assortment of variants, MissPompadour has adopted detailed categorization of its products, enabling customers to find specific shades and matching primers or sealers quickly and easily. As a result, the MissPompadour store system needed to be able to categorize and filter a large number of items dynamically, as paint is a very technical product and is handled differently depending on the use case and base material. MissPompadour’s store system therefore needed to be as flexible as possible, with an emphasis on different filter options.

The company previously used the WooCommerce store system, which suited its initial requirements and provided rapid access to the world of ecommerce. “But last year we outgrew the system,” explains co-founder Niklas Lütteken.

There was a lack of scalability, and it became increasingly difficult to manage performance peaks. In addition, the database structures were not designed to process the many hundreds of thousands of MissPompadour orders in the system, which meant that system maintenance took up too much time. There was no smart API either – an essential requirement for MissPompadour’s ecommerce, particularly for the paint expert’s own app.

From authentication to checkout – by the end, MissPompadour was finding everything relatively clunky. The store system no longer suited the needs of the company’s cutting-edge business plan.

Shopware’s impressive, future-oriented technology

When MissPompadour set out to search for a new store system, the paint specialists first made sure to establish what they needed that store system to offer. It subsequently became clear that Shopware offered the best fit for them and their go-ahead concept. What was needed was a solid technical basis and a future-oriented technology that would unleash the growth of the business. At MissPompadour, they felt it was important that the system could be adapted to their wishes and ideas.

“We’re also a big fan of systems that look good. Even the default template of Shopware 6 automatically included a whole range of factors that agencies had urged us to introduce as optimizations for the old store. We saw it and instantly felt that’s what a system should look like today,” Niklas Lütteken explains.

Shopware 6 also had everything the business would need as it moved towards internationalization and a multi-language configuration. In selecting the store system, the paint specialist also looked at flexibility and data privacy, and at technological requirements such as APIs and a user-friendly admin area. At the end of the day, factors such as Shopware’s API-first and headless approach were pivotal to MissPompadour’s decision.

Improved product categorization thanks to Shopware’s features

“The dynamic product groups are perfect for us,” explains Niklas Lütteken.

Small changes are often made to the many MissPompadour items, meaning that the product categories frequently have to be reassigned. The dynamic rules make it easy for MissPompadour to call up different product categories in no time, sparing the need to search through 500 products.

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Setting voucher rules or rules for the shopping basket is now a quick and simple process for MissPompadour too. Caching and performance are also running smoothly. “So far we haven’t encountered any performance problems and or any peaks we couldn’t handle with Shopware,” Niklas Lütteken reports.

MissPompadour is also impressed with the numerous filter options Shopware 6 offers. Tagging products with different characteristics means that the many paints and paint variants can be filtered precisely, enabling customers to find the products they are looking for quickly and easily.

Another aspect that has impressed MissPompadour is Shopware 6’s Shopping Experiences. “It took some getting used to at the start, but now we use the Shopping Experiences very intensively and are big fans,” says Niklas Lütteken. The paint specialists now use them in a range of different ways and have adapted them with their own components.

But it’s not just the Shopping Experiences that MissPompadour is impressed with – it’s Shopware’s custom fields too. Minor adaptations in the custom fields and different templates enabled the company to completely recreate MissPompadour’s old blog system.

Customer centricity: MissPompadour helps customers realize their projects

Customer centricity is the top priority for MissPompadour. When it comes to choosing paint, MissPompadour’s customers can depend on expert assistance. The company is aware that customers generally approach MissPompadour with an idea for a project rather than looking for a specific tile paint. It is therefore important to MissPompadour to inspire its customers. Support comes not only in the form of the project assistant but also an additional know-how section, the MissPompadour blog, and painting tips and videos. All the information customers need to find the right paint is right there in the online store. The blog is a particular source of inspiration and includes links to the products.

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MissPompadour also receives a lot of user-generated content because its customers often take pictures of their finished projects. Before and after pictures in particular tend to interest a lot of customers. MissPompadour uses these photos to inspire other customers and show the effect that can be achieved with the paints. MissPompadour is currently on the way to showcasing between 10 and 20 images per product.

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As an ecommerce pure player, MissPompadour relies on a broad omnichannel presence

Shopware 6 also enables MissPompadour to achieve a broad omnichannel presence. Here, the subject of customer centricity is also of particular importance.

“We want to be close to our users, which also means communicating via the preferred messenger app, or by email or phone, depending on the user’s preferences. We want to be contactable via all channels. That’s why it’s hugely important from our point of view to bundle inquiries so that we can manage them sensibly,” comments Niklas Lütteken.

This makes social media and social commerce very important to MissPompadour. The paint expert uses Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest Shopping, offers sales advice via WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram Messenger and set up a Facebook group in the early days of the business which now has over 65,000 members. As a result, MissPompadour has succeeded in building a community that provides mutual support and inspiration.

MissPompadour has big plans for the future

In the future, it would be ideal for MissPompadour if sales could be completed in the course of a conversation on Messenger. The paint experts are already working towards this goal, following the example of ecommerce retailers in Asia. MissPompadour sees huge potential in this area.

The project assistant in MissPompadour’s online store is also shortly to be replaced by a new, better alternative. Other plans the D2C retailer is working on include personalization and the further expansion of customer centricity and social commerce to move even closer to the company’s customers. The community idea is to be integrated even more strongly into the store in future, and internationalization will be another key focus

Happy with how the project was handled

Successful collaboration with Shopware’s partner agency EXCONCEPT

At the end of the day, MissPompadour is happy with the way the project was handled and is confident that the company will be able to realize its goals with Shopware and continue to grow its business. MissPompadour also deems collaboration with Shopware Platinum Partner EXCONCEPT to have been a total success.

“It was important to us to work with partners who are on the same wavelength. With EXCONCEPT, we instantly saw that we felt the same way about ecommerce and had the same idea of how a store should look,” Niklas Lütteken notes.

Coordination with the agency went smoothly and the agency was always on hand. The technical team at EXCONCEPT was able to provide MissPompadour with expert advice throughout.

“I have a little anecdote about this. An overnight update meant no one could access our online store – my fault. Absolutely nothing was working. The lead developer at EXCONCEPT came to our rescue at a time of night that definitely couldn’t be considered normal working hours. I truly appreciated that – I know it’s not the sort of thing you can take for granted. That episode and many others let us know that we were in good hands,” says Niklas Lütteken.

Supercharging the checkout with Stripe

Shopware and Stripe enhanced the checkout experience and drove revenue growth for MissPompadour using Stripe Payments and the Stripe Connector for Shopware 6. This integration improved payment acceptance and conversion rates significantly across the online channel and mobile app. Through card payments and key local payment methods, such as mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and buy now pay later options like Klarna. This provided the flexibility customers expect and drove a 72% year-over-year revenue growth.

Shopware was a match for every challenge

During the project, several minor challenges were encountered when linking up MissPompadour’s own app, but these were solved quickly and simply thanks to good API documentation and the overall intuitive design of Shopware’s API. The integration of mobile payments into the app via the API was more complicated than first thought, but here too, Shopware was able to offer the paint specialist a suitable solution.

“Now we feel that we meet all the essential requirements of an ecommerce business and can fully concentrate on expanding and perfecting the details of our MissPompadour experience. We are only just getting started, but now we have a system that will help us achieve what we have planned,” says Niklas Lütteken.

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Shopware Developer Digest April 24

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