Case Study: Koala achieves 3X faster development and lightning-fast site performance with Shopify Plus

Koala went headless to become faster, more flexible, and customize its customer experience

Koala, an Australian home‑goods brand known for its DTC focus and bold marketing, needed a faster, more flexible website to deliver a superior customer experience and rapidly launch new pages and content. To achieve this, Koala leveraged Shopify Plus as part of a headless commerce architecture—pairing Shopify Plus APIs with a third‑party CMS and a progressive web app (PWA)—so content could be decoupled from code and teams could move independently.

Using Shopify Plus, Koala implemented a headless solution with a PWA frontend and a shopping‑cart microservice between the PWA and Shopify Plus to handle discounts and bundling. The results: back‑end work now ships roughly 3X faster, developers can deploy performance boosts and new pages without downtime, and site response times improved by multiples after shifting API calls to the server. Shopify Plus enabled Koala to simplify client‑side code, let writers publish directly, and rapidly deliver differentiated experiences (for example, a new sustainability page) at scale.

Koala

Richard Bremner

Head of Technology