Detlev Louis: Legacy platform to Spryker at scale. +40% faster. New international stores in 20 days. No SEO impact.

The Challenge

Detlev Louis had built a significant e-commerce operation over decades, but the platform that underpinned it had reached its limits. The legacy system struggled to keep pace with growing demand and the rate of change in the market. Scaling it further required increasing workarounds, and the architecture was not equipped to support the speed of international expansion the business required. The migration challenge was significant. Moving a high-traffic, revenue-critical retail platform to Spryker, while maintaining uninterrupted operations, required careful sequencing, deep technical planning, and rigorous execution. A poorly managed migration carries the risk of SEO disruption, data loss, and customer experience degradation, any of which could translate directly into revenue impact for a business of this scale. A further constraint was internal capability. Spryker was a newer platform with a distinct architectural approach, and the in-house engineering team lacked the specific expertise to execute the migration confidently. Building that knowledge had to happen in parallel with the delivery work itself, which required a partner capable of both doing the work and transferring the skills. The stakes for getting it right were high: five years of customer reviews and data, SEO rankings built over decades of online operation, and the commercial credibility of a brand that had been serving motorcycle enthusiasts since 1938.

The Approach

Gradion has supported Detlev Louis’s digital evolution since 2018. The Spryker migration engagement was structured around three parallel priorities that together addressed the platform, the team, and the business’s international ambitions. Upskilling the Team: Gradion developers trained and certified the in-house team in Spryker, ensuring solid integration skills and strong test coverage from the outset. This was not a handoff at the end of the project - it was woven throughout the engagement so that internal capability grew in step with the platform itself. Boosting Performance: Custom modules were developed to improve site speed, preserve SEO rankings, and ensure that the full suite of e-commerce features operated reliably under production load. The +40% improvement in page load speed was a direct result of this targeted engineering work, not a side effect of the new platform alone. Enabling Global Growth: The new Spryker architecture was designed to make launching country-specific stores fast and repeatable. The result was an international rollout capability that reduced new store go-live time to 20 days per market - a step change from what the legacy system had made possible. Throughout the migration, Gradion maintained SEO stability and executed the seamless transfer of five years of customer reviews and data. The legacy plugin architecture was preserved in parallel, creating a portfolio that now covers both self-hosted and cloud-based Shopware environments and minimizes customer churn during the transition.