How Yoga Democracy completed a full-stack migration in just 6 weeks

What started as a small brand selling leggings at tradeshows has turned into a hyper-growth business with an international manufacturing arm. Yoga Democracy’s early years were marked by steady growth and expansion. But when the pandemic took hold and athleisure became the new black, Yoga Democracy saw a surge in demand and ramped its production accordingly. A new factory. A larger catalog. And increasingly complex operations. Business growth led to tech stack growth — and eventually, technical debt. 

Jeff Cannon, Yoga Democracy’s CEO, realized he needed a platform that’s as fluid, flexible, and agile as the brand’s performance pieces. Cannon met with Ember Agency, a systems integrator, in early July. By mid-August, the full-stack migration to Commerce Cloud was complete. Here’s the story, along with advice and lessons learned along the way.

86% increase in site speed

Reduced dependency on 30+ apps

6 week migration

How to tell when you’ve outgrown your ecommerce tech stack

As Yoga Democracy grew, what were some challenges that cropped up with your previous ecommerce tech stack, and what ultimately led to the decision to replatform?

We were very happy with our previous platform for a long time. In fact, we operated on it for about a decade, since the inception of Yoga Democracy. But as we started to scale, we added a few retail shops and some different manufacturing locations, we found ourselves in the midst of a tech stack of about 40 different things.

We operated with tons of plug-in apps and had a bunch of spreadsheets and documents, and it was creating a lot of back-and-forth. When we added an overseas manufacturing facility, we had the ability to make more products than our tech stack enabled us to sell. We didn’t have the ability to plug in demand for inventory with the logistics and operations of our factory.  

With our previous platform, we felt like we were hitting a ceiling. And Salesforce offered a really nice opportunity to take a tech stack of 40 things and consolidate it into a tech stack of nearly one. We don’t currently use much else.

The minimum viable product approach to implementation

Tell us about your implementation experience. How were you able to move so fast?

We partnered with Ember Agency for our migration to Commerce Cloud, and we did it in pretty phenomenal time: The implementation only took 6 weeks. We based our implementation on a reference application and used a crawl, walk, run approach. 

One of the first things we did was agree to a minimum viable product (MVP) so we could get to market fast. The idea was to build something sturdy and reliable, so we could grow. The way I see it: If you have a strong foundation, there’s no limit to what you can do or build on top of it. We wanted to make sure we didn’t end up with the same issue we ran into before, which was a ceiling that held us back from innovating and moving quickly. 

Stage	Description	Goal
Crawl	Start slow, focus on understanding the basics. Low risk, low complexity.	Learn, experiment, stabilize.
Walk	Intermediate stage, applying knowledge with some independence.	Gain confidence, improve efficiency.
Run	Full execution, optimized performance, and scalability.	Excel, scale, innovate.

Halfway through building out our MVP, we were already talking to Ember Agency about phases two and three, and whether that should involve digital marketing enhancements around dynamic customer segmentation, enhanced search, or enhanced campaigns. We’re also discussing tactics to improve loyalty. 

Before and after: What did the migration make possible?

What possibilities did a new platform open up for you?

Yoga Democracy is about 90% B2C ecommerce, but we also have a wholesale division. On our previous platform, we operated B2C and wholesale operations from completely separate parts of the system. It wasn’t possible to connect our inventory to the warehouse, which would lead to confusion because our shipping department didn’t have access to granular data about orders. Ultimately, wholesale was just completely disconnected from the rest of our business. 

Now I know it’s possible to connect it all: I can see wholesale, retail point-of-sale, and order management all in one view, in context. That streamlined operational experience just wasn’t available to us before. 

Another key point of our decision to migrate was that we wanted robust technology that would allow us to engage deeper with current customers and help us acquire new ones easier. Product alone won’t get digital customers to return; you also need to give them a bunch of other good feelings about the relationship with your brand while they shop — and that comes from the right technology.

Here’s an example: Today, I had a customer reach out and when I looked at her account, I could quickly see that she has a long history with us — a total of 19 orders. With just one click I uncovered that her first order with Yoga Democracy dates all the way back to 2016. Immediately, I can tell she’s been shopping with us for almost a decade. Tools that bring this information to the surface quickly help agents tailor the experience and ensure that high value customers get the right level of service and the right kinds of offers.

Customers have so many places to buy nowadays. There are literally thousands of places you can go to buy leggings. So the goal is to innovate new experiences that resonate with our customers and differentiate our brand. And that’s only possible with easy access to the right data. 

A rising tide lifts all boats: How replatforming can impact the rest of your business

How has consolidating your tech stack helped you improve the overall customer experience?

Commerce isn’t just one part of your business. Its success also depends on the success of other areas, like marketing and service (and vice versa). It encompasses so much: Commerce includes finance, legal, international teams, executives. You have to look at commerce holistically. All the moving parts are dependent on each other, and they’re symbiotic.  

The right systems will help you democratize access to the right data from around your business, and enable that data to pass between a unified system that flows back into commerce. Once you do that, you can create and influence shopping journeys in a way that positively impacts revenue and the customer experience. This helps spark innovation and really, the possibilities are endless.

Advice for growing companies

My best advice is to strategize with your goals in mind. For example, if you have a goal to open five retail stores and right now you’re strictly an ecommerce brand, take that into consideration as you make decisions about technology. When you’re deciding on software, choose solutions that will be versatile for several years. When it comes to decisions like this, people tend to miss that so much of your investment is about time. 

If it takes years to get to the place you want with your technology, that’s a lot of team resources and conference calls and days spent creating new ideas  — and all of this adds up to a lot of time. And time is expensive. So take that into consideration when you make big decisions about where you’re going. Always make sure your decision-making is attached to your goals.