Encora Celebrates L.L.Bean's "Best Commerce Transformation in Retail" Win at Elevate 2025

At the 2025 Elevate Global Commerce Summit, L.L.Bean received the award for the "Best Commerce Transformation in Retail." Encora was recognized as the systems integrator that helped make this transformation possible—a testament to our teams' collaborative engineering and deep trust.

This prestigious recognition at one of retail's premier industry events validates the innovative transformation of a century-old retailer's technology infrastructure.

As L.L.Bean shared at the ceremony, "We selected Encora as our systems integrator. They were a fantastic partner throughout the entire project, complementing our in-house team and what we could provide from a development perspective."

Reimagining a Retail Icon for the Digital Era

Encora led a multi-phase migration that modernized over 28 years of legacy systems. The result? L.L.Bean achieved its smoothest holiday season operations in two decades. This wasn't just a technology upgrade—it was retelling the story of how a heritage brand delivers modern, seamless customer experiences.

The careful transition strategy—starting with just 1% of traffic and gradually scaling to 100%—exemplified our risk-mitigation approach. Each phase allowed for thorough testing and refinement before broader deployment, ensuring zero disruption to the customer experience. The transformation delivered:

• Cloud infrastructure that effortlessly handles seasonal traffic spikes

• Headless architecture to enable unified experiences across all channels

• Modern pricing, inventory, and promotion engines via commercetools

• Elimination of technical debt and operational bottlenecks

Encora worked closely with L.L.Bean and Commercetools through daily communication and weekly alignment meetings—a collaborative model that defines how we deliver transformation in high-stakes retail environments.

Key Insights from Elevate 2025: The Future of Retail

The summit brought together commerce leaders to explore transformative trends reshaping the industry. Here are a few key insights from the event:

The Hyper-Personalized Universe

The future of retail lies in creating unified experiences that are simultaneously personal, relevant, and revenue-generating. This goes beyond simple product recommendations—it's about orchestrating every touchpoint to feel uniquely crafted for each customer.

Retailers implementing true hyper-personalization are seeing customers spend more time on their platforms, have larger cart sizes, and increase lifetime value. The key is connecting data across channels to understand what customers buy, why they buy, and what they want next.

The Intelligence Revolution

AI fundamentally transforms retail operations by unlocking smarter decisions, faster outcomes, and deeper customer value. The most exciting development is Agentic AI—autonomous systems that can make complex decisions without human intervention.

Google's projection at Elevate showed this market exploding from $5B in 2024 to $47B by 2030, representing one of the fastest-growing segments in retail technology. These AI agents can handle everything from dynamic pricing optimization to inventory management, customer service automation, and predictive analytics. Early adopters are already seeing reduced operational costs alongside improved customer satisfaction scores.

The Composable Imperative

Modern retailers need more agility to adapt to new business models and evolving customer touchpoints. Composable commerce architecture—built on microservices, API-first design, cloud-native infrastructure, and headless principles—provides this flexibility.

Instead of monolithic platforms that may take months to update, composable systems allow retailers to swap components, test new features, and iterate rapidly based on honest customer feedback. This architectural approach proved essential during recent years when retailers had to pivot quickly to new fulfillment models and digital experiences.

From SEO to AEO: The Discovery Revolution

There is a fundamental shift in how customers find products online. As IDC pointed out at Elevate 2025, traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is giving way to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), where AI agents interpret user intent rather than match keywords. This

means retailers must rethink their entire content strategy. To stay visible, they must now structure their content for AI-driven discovery. Early movers in AEO are already seeing increased visibility in AI-powered shopping assistants and voice commerce platforms.

Commerce MCP: Integrating the AI Ecosystem

The launch of Commerce MCP (Model Context Protocol) addresses a critical challenge—integrating the various AI agents that organizations now use across operations.

As retailers adopt multiple AI solutions for different functions, MCP provides a framework for these systems to communicate and collaborate effectively. This integration layer becomes essential as businesses move from isolated AI implementations to comprehensive intelligent ecosystems.

The Path Forward

The insights from Elevate 2025 confirm that retail transformation isn't slowing down—it's accelerating. Success requires not just adopting new technologies but a fundamental rethink of how to serve customers in an AI-driven, composable world.

Encora combines insights into the latest retail trends with proven implementation expertise, delivered through our hybrid model that balances local collaboration with specialized global talent.

Ready to write your own transformation success story? Contact our commerce specialists to learn how we can help modernize your retail operations.