Kulmine

How it was realised

The project came to us through our label colleague Ankur Sood, whose mother Petra Sood runs Kulmine together with his brother Amitab. The brief was continuity: the same shop the customers know, on technology that will carry it for the next decade. The business case wrote itself: what Kulmine saved on plugin licences financed the migration.

For the customers nothing changed and much improved: the shop, the magazine with its Menszyklopädie, the store finder and the long product guides now live in one place, load fast on a phone and are easier to find on Google and in local search. The design stayed; the paths to the basket got shorter.

Behind the shop, the everyday work got lighter. Set articles are picked as their parts, shipping labels print from the order, payments are matched to invoices as the money arrives, and the bookkeeping goes to the accountant as an export instead of a second system.

The old warehouse scanner would not have survived the move, so we designed its replacement with Amitab Sood at the packing table: Kulmine Scanner, an app for the iPhone that handles picking, packing, labels, goods receipt and stock counts, and keeps working when the warehouse Wi-Fi does not.

The move itself was rehearsed, not improvised: a full trial run a week ahead, three dress rehearsals, then the switch while the old shop kept selling until the last hour. The plan, the decisions and the hours were written down and shared with Kulmine throughout.

What it solved

• Sixty-six old plugins reviewed one by one and replaced by standard features or our own code, none silently dropped; the licence fees they no longer cost paid for the migration.
• Pick, pack and ship without the vendor scanner: a replacement designed at the packing table and built as an app of Kulmine's own.
• Bookkeeping inside the shop: numbered documents, bank reconciliation and the DATEV export, so nothing is typed twice.
• A front end that keeps its design and gains conversion, search-engine and geo optimisation on the way.
• Consent done properly: nothing loads before a decision, the decision is logged, and the shop works with everything declined.