NN07, a brand with no borders, needs technology without limits

No Nationality (NN07) was born out of passion for design. Victor Lindh and Ulrik Pedersen decided to create a brand without borders, both literally and figuratively. It all started in 2007 with a trip to Tokyo. Japan — with its rich culture, vintage aesthetics, deep-rooted perfectionism and artistry — is still a strong inspiration for the brand. NN07 believes in self-expression, and that’s why they draw from personalities and communities. 

From these values come timeless menswear: trousers, jackets, patterned knits, shirts, overshirts, sweatshirts and more. They’re creating the classics of tomorrow with a modern outlook. Their unique style and craftsmanship is appreciated worldwide, both by customers and the fashion community. 

Old-fashioned that’s out of fashion

NN07 store was originally powered by Magento 1 — an on-premises legacy monolithic platform. It was no longer supported after being purchased by Adobe (which moved Magento to Adobe Commerce Cloud), but moving to Magento 2 wasn’t an option either —Adobe stopped supporting the on-premise solution as they were building a new one. NN07 had no choice but to look for another provider. 

Lack of support wasn’t the only challenge that NN07’s store was facing. They had to reinvest a significant amount of their revenue into their technology stack. Self-hosted solutions have a relatively high total cost of ownership. Hosting is the most expensive infrastructure fee, especially for international brands that require a flexible and scalable option ready to handle large capacities of traffic and seasonal spikes. NN07 faced a lot of hosting-related challenges. It wasn’t scalable enough, and it was causing significant performance issues, especially during peak hours and peak season. The store was visibly slower at those times.

On top of hosting fees, NN07 still had to maintain the platform itself, which was taking both money and time that could have been invested in research and development. They were struggling to keep up a solution that wasn’t even meeting their needs. NN07 would have to update their B2B and DTC platforms at the same time in order to improve performance and customer experience. Legacy monolithic platforms are well known for their code-breaking upgrades that cause plugin conflicts, bugs and instability leading to downtime. It would be another big investment for minimal benefits. 

Everyday work wasn’t efficient either. NN07’s team had a lot of struggles with product information enrichment, which was complicated and time-consuming. This further influenced business operations and caused additional expenses.

Carefully considering all those challenges, NN07 was convinced to not only change a particular solution but their ecommerce technology all together. They knew that to achieve automatic scalability, they had to migrate to SaaS and a headless ecommerce platform. 

A modern brand powered by modern technology

After extensive research, NN07 was considering two technologies and two potential partners: 

• Centra – a fashion-focused headless ecommerce platform. 

• Shopify Plus — an SaaS monolithic platform.

While Shopify Plus is a well-known provider, their platform isn’t focused on fashion. Due to the lack of crucial features out of the box, a fashion site using them requires a lot of dedicated development and integrations before launch. Other challenges include: a limited template-based design system, limited development flexibility and limited wholesale solutions. 

Centra focuses on customers’ needs — we’re always ready to listen and look for the best solution. In cooperation with Grebban, we’ve delivered a personalized sales process and as a result advanced a fashion-focused platform with a custom front end. 

NN07 got the robust ecommerce engine ready to power their online store with various native features: 

• One store for all markets. The previously complex setup required a lot of repetitive administrative work, which led to both human error and technical issues. It affected customer experience and internal operations. It simply didn’t support NN07’s global ambitions. Now, Centra keeps track of all the data through all the markets. One platform, one upload per product. 

• One platform for all operations. Having all B2B and DTC features available from one platform makes everyday work more efficient and easier: 
  • Customer groups (for sharing of discounts, pricing, restrictions/eligibility, etc.)

  • Price lists (that can be shared or customer-specific)

  • Tiered pricing/volume pricing (as well as customer-specific adaptations)

  • Advanced discount management

  • Credit limits, payment terms 

  • Customer group and customer-level product availability

  • Purchasing roles / levels

  • Quotations

  • Advanced shipment management
  
  With Centra, NN07 can build a wholesale process that mirrors DTC sales. 

• Easy product enrichment. Enriching product processes became so easy with Centra that NN07 was able to outsource it to an external contractor, which saved them a lot of administration time and manpower that they could then use for boosting sales and improving customer service.

• Friendly UI. Centra’s user interface takes the UX experience to a whole new level. Centra’s admin panel and dashboard are easy to configure, and it’s simple to create new landing pages, categories and campaigns.

• Stable performance. The platform never slows down, even during peak hours and peak season. 

• Design freedom. NN07 had the freedom to design their desired experience and choose the front-end technology to back it up. Grebban helped them express their brand’s character, while Centra provided seamless shopping for their customers. NN07 is no longer locked with a vendor or stuck within the template — they can do any front-end changes at any time. 

NN07's current ecommerce tech-stack on Centra

With their new technology stack, NN07 experienced:

• 60% revenue growth, influenced by deploying Centra as their ecommerce platform

• Scalability without limits, without negatively impacting the store’s performance 

• A switch from Repay to Adyen as their PSP

• A successful launch in eight new markets.

Most importantly, NN07 got the power to build their online store like they’re building their brand: with attention to the needs of today and tomorrow, and without any limitations.