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Mona
Founded in 1989, Mona has sold online via 6 stores since 2015. Based in Serbia, the internationally-recognised fashion brand are known for their bold design and manufacturing of quality leather bags and jackets.
Key Points
Allow a more stable platform for long term growth and stability
Improve ease of management for store operations
Make expanding into new regions operationally easier
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The Client
Mona’s story begins three decades ago with a married couple: Nada and Djordje Mmomirovic. Finding a space in the market for high-quality products that oozed sophistication and ignited confidence in consumers, the couple founded modern fashion brand Mona.
The brand now operates approximately 49 physical retail stores with the HQ and the majority of their stores located within Serbia. The early 2000’s saw expansion into Bosnian, Macedonian, Montenegrin markets, with further growth into Croatia in 2019.
While family values have remained at the core of Mona, the business has grown exponentially, scaling to several foreign markets with plans to expand even further.
Since their launch online back in 2015, Mona’s six ecommerce sites have become outdated. Looking to improve the scalability and market to the consumer more effectively, they came to the conclusion that an upgrade was necessary.
The Challenge
“The scope of the project was adventurous”, says Senior Project Manager Tia Hemming. After a thorough discovery session, the team agreed to build the sites on BigCommerce to use as a base for order processing, while a headless Vercel front-end maintained Mona’s position in the market and allowed for growth. It was also important to Mona that the site integrated with their ERP, and as such the 5874 Commerce team needed to build an integration layer to allow the flow of information.
“There were challenges around building something new; it took us outside of our comfort zone and challenged our ways of thinking. The project required some dynamic solutions as the functionality that was originally scoped needed further refinement to fit the builds needs. We also had to gather some deeper understanding of how different countries’ commerce works, i.e. taxation and delivery requirements”
– Tia Hemming, Senior Project Manager
While dealing with tax in the EU and the US had become second nature to the 5874 team, there were difficulties presented here due to the stores being in Eastern Europe where some countries had joined the Euro and others hadn’t. With the website being one store with one URL, there needed to be some clever backend efficiency having six separate BigCommerce stores sitting underneath.
Project Type
Tech Partners
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Our Solution
Mona came to 5874 Commerce looking for a modern and agile platform, solution environment and a strong partnership to enable them to deliver on their longer-term growth plans.
In order to enable them to transform the family business to super scalable B2C multi-country/channel/marketplace operation, it became clear that Ionic React and BigCommerce should be the platforms of choice for build. BigCommerce as a super-scalable solution for ecommerce businesses and Ionic as it allows one code base for web, iOS and android, reducing development time.
During the build, 5874 found the initial plan for some of the integration layer data flows would not work effectively for Mona’s requirements. To tackle this, the team set up workshops with the appropriate people, both client side and from the 5874 team, to reach a solution that was still inscope of the delivery of the project. This approach meant that the right people delivered and received information, and the client understood the details of how to get where they needed to be.
The overall result for Mona is a modern and scalable website that makes expansion into new regions operationally easier. Mona now has greater control over the CMS and the capabilities to drive more sales, offer customers a best-in-class user journey and easily manage all store operations.
Project Results
- In the first month there have been upwards of 3,000 orders
- 52k users – 18k new (Serbia only)
- High Lighthouse score on desktop (90/100 on Homepage)
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