CASE STUDY • L.L.Bean

How L.L.Bean Future-proofed its $1 Billion USD Digital Channel with Composable Commerce

Industry

Retail & Consumer

Our Contributions

Core Modernization, Multi-modal Commerce, Intelligent Operations

How L.L.Bean future-proofed its $1 billion USD digital channel with composable commerce

The Challenge

L.L.Bean has been a direct-to-consumer pioneer for over a century, building its reputation on high-quality outdoor products. Over the past 30 years, digital commerce has become the company's most significant revenue driver, generating over $1 Billion USD annually and serving 5.5 million online customers. While L.L.Bean embraced every eCommerce innovation wave and added omnichannel features like buy online, pick up in-store, it needed to modernize its architecture to keep pace with customer expectations, unwind custom-built functionality that had become difficult to maintain, migrate millions of customer accounts and product data without disrupting its main sales channel, and future-proof its commerce foundation to support seamless omnichannel experiences.

How We Did It

L.L.Bean conducted a thorough RFP process and market evaluation, selecting commercetools for its MACH-based, composable architecture and ability to support continuous optimization. Encora was chosen as the system integration partner, bringing experience in scalable eCommerce implementations. The project was launched with a methodical, phased rollout plan designed to protect the core revenue-generating channel.

Guest checkout migration

The initial release focused on migrating guest checkout functionality, isolating just the cart and checkout components. Completed ahead of the 2023 peak season, commercetools handled over 50% of peak orders without disruption.

Registered user migration

All legacy web accounts were migrated through a one-time batch load, followed by real-time synchronization. Customers reset passwords with stronger requirements, then accounts were activated and data like carts and wish lists migrated in real time.

Full storefront migration

The final release covered search, navigation, content and product pages, integrating all 250,000 SKUs into commercetools. L.L.Bean also migrated its homegrown merchandising tools to commercetools' Merchant Center.

Phased traffic rollout

A collaborative team of 50 people from L.L.Bean, Encora and commercetools used feature toggling and gradual traffic ramp-up strategies, starting at 0% and scaling to 100% over two months per release, completing on time and budget with zero outages.

This video is created and owned by commercetool.

The Result: Enterprise-scale helping to enable a successful peak season

Encora transformed L.L.Bean's commerce infrastructure into a modern, scalable platform that enabled their most successful holiday season in over two decades from a technical standpoint. The transformation delivered significant business improvements:

250K

SKUs integrated

orders/sec on Cyber Monday

5.5M

accounts migrated

The migration to commercetools, implemented by Encora, transformed how L.L.Bean delivers value to customers, unifying carts, orders and web hierarchy in a platform that enables frictionless omnichannel experiences.

During the 28-month transition, L.L.Bean launched over 100 enhancements, generating more than $10 million USD in incremental revenue.
The migration was completed on time in May/June 2024, allowing preparation ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The first holiday season achieved zero unplanned outages and 100% website availability, helping to make 2024 one of the strongest in company history.
On Cyber Monday, L.L.Bean processed over five orders per second during the peak hour between 9 and 10 pm, demonstrating the platform's ability to scale and maintain high performance.
The company simplified infrastructure from 8 to 3 environments, deployed over 50 microservices and 400+ cloud functions with customizations stored in L.L.Bean's own cloud for independent scaling
L.L.Bean migrated 250,000 SKUs, removed 18,000+ obsolete product pages, and transitioned from batch-driven to event-driven architecture for automated product launches and workflows with authenticated, auditable access across systems.

The Bottom Line

Working with Encora and commercetools, L.L.Bean can now focus on continuous innovation that positively impacts customer experiences and the company's bottom line. The composable, MACH-based platform provides the agility and scalability needed to meet evolving customer expectations while maintaining the reliability of a mission-critical revenue channel.