A headless and composable evolution for a leading agricultural company

Making our world a better place: The Schippers Group's choice of a headless content management system to share their mission.

The Schippers Group, a leading supplier of hygiene solutions for agriculture, aimed to enhance its digital presence. Their mission is to significantly decrease antibiotic use in livestock farming to combat antimicrobial resistance. Their strategy involves helping farmers optimise farm hygiene, resulting in healthier animals and increased profitability without antibiotics.

Sharing their expertise and experience is crucial to their mission. They also seek to engage meaningfully with farmers across their expanding network of touchpoints, brands, and channels. They chose a headless content management system (headless CMS) combined with a new design system to reach this ambition.

Adopting a headless content strategy allows for seamless content scalability, while the implementation of a design system ensures a consistent visual representation of the content. The combination of the two establishes a long-lasting foundation. This setup also enables a more efficient content distribution across various channels and devices, allowing Schippers to improve their visibility and share their expertise more effectively across different touchpoints.

The beginning of a headless and composable evolution

Terms like “headless” and “composable” are often used to explain how to make a marketing or content team more efficient. However, as with all buzzwords, few people truly understand these terms. With The Schippers Group, that's why we started with the basics. We helped them understand what headless and composable meant. And, most importantly, how it could impact their business in the short and long term.

Moving to a headless CMS requires a shift in content strategy involving not just the content team, but also designers, developers, management, and other stakeholders.

Traditional content is usually created with a specific page or context in mind. With a headless CMS, content can be repurposed for various channels, including social media, slide decks, and even billboards. The Schippers Group knew they wanted to move in this direction and they were aware that adapting to this new approach would take time. That's why, together, we decided to focus on one use case first to prove its value.

Using storytelling in e-commerce to boost customer engagement

When you want to test a new approach, it helps to start small and define what you want so you can validate the direction before you proceed. Working with The Schippers Group, we initially focused on improving the advisory section of the existing MS Schippers e-commerce platform, one of their key brands.

We have found that e-commerce greatly benefits from the integration of strategic content. Starting in the advice domain has proven to be an excellent decision, as it not only engages website visitors effectively but also seamlessly integrates content and products. Moreover, this approach enables The Schippers Group to test a specific use case and adjust their operations to align with a new way of working.

When we set out to revamp a specific part of the system, we were aware that it would pose certain challenges. It was crucial for us to carefully analyse how our solution would seamlessly integrate with the current platform, the wider IT environment, and the infrastructure as a whole. Leveraging our profound technical expertise, we effectively advised The Schippers Group on the architecture and the essential measures required to incorporate the solution into their existing infrastructure.

Creating a consistent brand experience with a design system

We ensured the user experience matched the new changes. We combined content from Storyblok, the new headless CMS platform chosen by The Schippers Group, and products from the existing Intershop commerce platform, bringing them together in front-end components that provided more consistency. We introduced a design system to make sure the brand experience would remain consistent across all pages that can be themed over time to make sure we can use the same design system and component library for other brands.

Adopting a headless content strategy allowed for seamless content scalability, while the implementation of a design system ensured consistent visual representation of the content. We also focused on creating a digital experience that would increase page performance and thus positively influence organic search results.

That wasn't the only speed we looked at, though. The Schippers Group also wanted a platform that their content teams could easily work with and that would save them a lot of time creating pages. The team has now published over 300 pages on Storyblok with an average efficiency gain of 8 hours per page. For those of you who are good at numbers, yes they have saved over 2.400 hours so far and we've only been live a few months now. The new pages are also 100% responsive and translated in all languages, which wasn't the case before. Overall, the project results have been extremely positive.

The MS Schippers team was also highly involved throughout the project and displayed great enthusiasm in understanding the concepts of headless and composable. Our approach always involves working alongside our clients, rather than simply for them, and this project was no exception. We are thrilled to report that our initial use case, the advice domain, has been successfully integrated, and we are already in the process of planning the next phase of this exciting project.

The results of this project

• Time to build a page reduced by 60%

• Page speed increased by (LCP from 4.5 seconds to <2.5 seconds after launch) (CLS from 0.41 to <0.1 after launch)

• 400+ landing pages have been built since launch

• From 30% responsive components to 100% responsive components