Making fashion composable: Essentiel Antwerp’s success story

Essentiel Antwerp is a Belgian luxury fashion brand created in 1999. A year later, Essentiel Antwerp opened its first store in its namesake city, Antwerp. What started out as a business that only sold t-shirts quickly transformed into a successful all-around fashion brand with out-of-the-box designs that feature original and colorful prints. In the midst of success, Essentiel Antwerp stays true to its original mission to create fashion that empowers women to feel confident and powerful in their own skin. Essentiel Antwerp now has stores in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the UK, South Korea, and the USA, where they have partnered with renowned retailers such as Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus, Revolve, and Anthropologie, selling at 120 multi-brand stores and department stores across the country. Their turnover grew by 250 percent just in America last year and they have now taken a bite of the Big Apple and opened their newest store in New York’s fashionable Soho district.
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The brand received a boost thanks to the popular Netflix series Emily in Paris, starring Lily Collins since the main character wears several Essentiel Antwerp sweaters in the show. After the series launched, customers began queuing up for the Essentiel Antwerp sweaters that were seen on screen: “We have requests from Asia and America,” says co-founder of Essentiel Antwep Inge Onsea.

Having amassed a substantial customer base from its physical stores, Essentiel Antwerp wanted to expand its reach to all corners of the world and digitalize its brand to start selling its products in the e-commerce market. However, having both physical and online stores comes with the challenge of trying to ensure a smooth omnichannel experience for customers, something that could be achieved through a composable stack.

Their wish to have a composable structure stemmed from a desire to be more flexible, have faster and more efficient development and content updates, be free to choose the best systems suited to their technological needs and eradicate the need for custom-built solutions.

Essentiel Antwerp and Alumio’s collaboration began through one of our valued partners, Whataboutdigital, who worked closely with Essentiel Antwerp and recommended Alumio as the ideal solution to solve complex e-commerce integration challenges and empower composable structures.

Essentiel Antwerp used Alumio to integrate Adyen (Payment gateway), Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (ERP), Perfion (PIM), Channable (channel marketplace), Adobe Commerce (Magento) (e-commerce platform), Algolia (search-as-a-service platform), Vertex (tax compliance software), Bleckmann (logistics), and Creditsafe (multinational provider of online company credit scores and credit report information), among others.

By acting as a middleware between all the different systems in Essentiel Antwerp’s composable structure, Alumio ensured real-time data exchange between all connected endpoints and guaranteed a well-functioning IT landscape with automation capabilities.