Artnight.com, established in Germany by David Neisinger in 2016, set out to offer a unique blend of creative entertainment. The company’s main concept was to host art-making sessions led by professional artists in local bars and restaurants, providing a space for people to engage in creativity while socializing. These events served as an excellent opportunity for participants to connect with new people in a relaxed and artistic environment.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, ArtNight adapted to the changing landscape by launching two new ventures: PlantNight and BakeNight. These initiatives expanded the brand’s reach, offering experiences in floristry, DIY crafting, and baking, thus maintaining the essence of ArtNight’s creative and engaging ethos.
While ArtNight’s primary focus was on the consumer market (B2C), they also expanded into the business-to-business (B2B) sector with Private ArtNights. This service provided bespoke events tailored for companies seeking distinctive team-building activities or engaging corporate events.
The main challenge with ArtNight’s initial platform, based on WooCommerce, was its limited capacity to support the company’s growing needs. While WooCommerce may be suitable for smaller businesses with less emphasis on data consistency and accessibility, it fell short for a rapidly growing company like ArtNight.
As the business expanded, the website’s performance started to deteriorate due to the increasing volume of data, the complexity of its structure, and the inherent performance limitations of WooCommerce. This decline in website speed resulted in poor user experience (UX) and difficulties in managing data. These problems became significant roadblocks to the business’s scalability and further development. Moreover, ArtNight’s aspiration to reach a wider audience across Europe and eventually globally made it clear that a more capable and scalable solution was necessary to realize its vision of delivering value to a broader customer base.
ArtNight decided to collaborate with BitBag, a software agency, with a primary goal to create a new platform. This involved building the backend on Sylius, integrating it with Vue Storefront for the front end, and incorporating Pimcore for Product Information Management (PIM). The company aimed to introduce a gift card system, internationalize the entire system (including time zones and translations), and launch video courses.
The broader scope of the project included several key challenges and goals:
Through their partnership with BitBag, ArtNight received a platform that marked a significant upgrade in their digital capabilities. The platform’s backend was built on Sylius, a headless solution renowned for its speed and reliability. For the frontend, VueStorefront, which is a Progressive Web App (PWA) capable of running like a native application on mobile devices, was chosen. This combination enhanced the site’s accessibility, performance, and overall user experience, making it well-integrated, stable, and scalable. This improvement meant the business could grow and expand to a certain extent without additional interventions.
Additionally, to cater to the specific needs of the B2B market, a separate B2B site was developed by the frontend developers using the Vue.js and Nuxt frameworks. This development was explicitly aimed at meeting the demands of the B2B sector, demonstrating a strategic approach to covering different market segments.
To explore this case-study journey and outcomes, visit BitBag’s website.
