The story of Sylius’ cooperation with MK DIRECT Holding is quite rich. It dates back to 2018 when one of the brands under MKD reached out to us to deepen their Sylius understanding.
After two years of our shared path, we are pleased to announce it officially and sum up a little bit of all of our collaboration. We’d also like to give you a sneak peek of our joint plans for the future.
MK DIRECT is a key French player in the multi-channel distribution of home linen and clothes. The Group is composed of three complementary brands:
Using a versatile business model that combines print catalogs, e-shop, and a nationwide network of boutiques, MK DIRECT Group is the sole multi-channel player in its segment.
As the leader in the French market with €60M online and €200M+ total revenue, MKD holds over 20% of the market share. The Group has more than five million customers and over five hundred workers. Its brands are also already present in Europe (Benelux, DACH, Italy…).
From Sylius’ side, Envie de Fraise has been pretty much an ideal client from the very beginning. The fashion industry has always been the best fit for Sylius as a B2C eCommerce platform, and brands such as EDF quickly became one of our main interests.
Shortly after the first contact, Envie de Fraise’s in-house team decided to go forward with a Sylius training and architecture workshop to prepare for the upcoming re-platforming. Back then and to this day, EDF is one of the biggest live PrestaShop web stores of €15M+ annual revenue. We are quite proud to say that everything went very well, and of course, we’re more than happy we could have been of help.
Maintaining a heavily customized PrestaShop 1.5 setup and developing a new website turned out to be a complex process. Meanwhile, the company was acquired by MKD Holding. The business decision was to wait with re-platforming until the eCommerce platform is selected for all 3 brands. The other two are running on old Magento 1 custom setups. So we had two well-known, legacy technologies against Sylius – modern, but still not widely recognizable market challenger.
It is essential to mention here that great credit for the smooth start of the project goes to Synolia – Sylius’ French Leading Solution Partner. Since March, when the Envie de Fraise’s re-platforming started, Synolia has supported the brand’s in-house team in the development. Before that, Synolia had been a great help by sharing its eCommerce expertise and advising MKD on various decision-making stages with professional consulting services and workshops.
Envie de Fraise is just the start of our joint journey with MK Direct and Synolia. The two other brands of MKD we’ve mentioned earlier, Françoise Saget and Linvosges, are also going to re-platform to Sylius Plus once the current project is live. We’re very much looking forward to the knowledge and experience this cooperation will bring. It’s also great to work on such an exciting project with one of our Leading Partners.
We are happy to already receive very good feedback from the stakeholders and the development team. The project shall have an impressive Best of Breed technology stack (Sylius eCommerce, Akeneo PIM, Odoo ERP, Prismic CMS, Algolia for search, Sendinblue MA, Attraqt AI, Actito CRM, Zendesk for customer service, Netlify, Gatsby for headless frontend and more) that should become a top reference for modern eCommerce implementations
