German beauty firm Cosnova has selected Mobify’s Front-end as a service for its presentation layer and orchestrator of its ecosystem of technologies that form a modern commerce architecture, the two companies announced today.

A beauty and cosmetics brand operating globally and based in Sulzbach, near Frankfurt, Cosnova has three major brands, including Lov, Catrice and Essence, which is the biggest-selling cosmetics monobrand across the globe.

With Mobify as its front-end, the company is creating a “headless” commerce environment with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Amplience Dynamic Content and WUNDER for customer engagement on the backend, along with other best-in-breed solutions.

By leveraging APIs to separate critical back-end systems from the fast moving world of front-end digital experiences, Cosnova said it is delivering on a long-promised vision for eCommerce: to rapidly build personalized, front-end customer experiences, increase agility, gain the freedom to experiment, easily call on commerce and content functionality across any touchpoint, and scale more efficiently using the headless approach.

“We wanted a complete headless environment to make it easier to add and change our customer-facing digital experiences across brands without disrupting back-end systems or the overall architecture,” said Cosnova chief digital officer Dirk Lauber. “Mobify helped us in two important ways. First, we wanted to avoid the challenge of building front-end experiences from scratch. Mobify is a mature platform that can help us create high performing and flexible front-end experiences, such as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), that we can evolve for each brand and different markets. Second, we wanted an open presentation layer that could help unify our entire architecture. This enabled us to use our best-of-breed ecommerce, CMS and personalization solutions and turn our focus to creating, testing and optimizing front-end solutions that are critical to winning over customers.”

Although headless architectures are not new, few companies have implemented Cosnova’s modern approach which leverages an agile front-end that’s completely independent of any of the back-end business logic and integrated using APIs.

Cosnova’s decoupled Mobify front-end has everything the company needs to build and experiment with proven front-end solutions such as PWAs for mobile, tablet and desktop, as well as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), native apps, and future touchpoints as they emerge
In addition, pairing Mobify with Amplience’s API-first headless CMS solution separates the company’s content from the presentation. This enables much higher content reuse, dynamic rendering and personalization across sites, apps, voice interfaces and, in-store displays. On top of this, solutions such as WUNDER, which is focused on AI-based personalization, can then run back-end experiments without disrupting front-end functions.

“Cosnova is transforming its business with a modern ecosystem that truly moves at the speed of consumer technology and their ever-evolving demands,” said Mobify CEO Igor Faletski. “Ultimately, the shopper will be able to purchase any product across any brand or partner touchpoint and receive the same incredible personalized shopping journey and service. In the short term, having a PWA capable of improving the customer experience quickly will generate more conversions and engagement.”