Case Study: Express achieves multiple releases per week and scalable, resilient commerce with commercetools

How Express went from releasing updates every 2 to 3 months to multiple releases a week

Express, a global fashion retailer specializing in young adult apparel, was held back by a monolithic Oracle ATG platform that limited innovation and agility. Seeking a more adaptable, headless commerce solution, Express chose commercetools’ cloud-native, API-first, microservices platform to replace parts of its legacy stack and better respond to changing consumer behavior.

commercetools implemented a MACH-based headless architecture that let Express move from releasing updates every 2–3 months to multiple releases per week and auto-scale during a viral promotion that generated 3x the traffic of their largest Black Friday without site slowdown. The faster cadence enabled five major digital changes in the three months before Black Friday (Klarna payments, a new BOPUS, improved product pages, a loyalty rebrand, and Stylitics integration) and delivered capabilities like Endless Aisle and real-time PIM, boosting resilience and accelerating innovation.

Express

Brendan Gualdoni

Vice President of Enterprise Architecture, Commerce and Integration