The Challenge of Global Scale
Breuninger is one of Europe’s leading fashion, beauty, and lifestyle destinations in the premium and luxury segments. As the company rapidly expands its global footprint, the demands on its digital architecture continue to surge. Ultimately, Breuninger’s legacy search architecture had reached its technical limits.
The Status Quo: When Growth Becomes a Cost Driver
The legacy search solution was proprietary, expensive to operate, difficult to scale, and highly inflexible. Licensing and operational costs escalated with every new market, language, and feature introduced.
At the same time, system maintenance grew increasingly complex, driving up the need for manual work in the back office. As a result, both system performance and the user experience were severely impacted. While the platform remained functional, core processes slowed down significantly under heavy load.
About Breuninger
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Partnership between Breuninger and neuland
Breuninger’s Starting Position
The challenge was both technological and structural: a legacy infrastructure, complex systemic dependencies, and a search architecture that—despite numerous expansions over the years—could no longer meet modern e-commerce requirements.
Simply scaling the existing legacy system would have demanded massive upfront investments in additional hardware and restrictive licensing fees.
The ultimate objective was to engineer a highly resilient, scalable solution that simultaneously delivered superior cost-efficiency.
A Phased Rollout for Seamless User Acceptance
Partnering closely with Breuninger, we replaced the legacy search infrastructure with an open-source solution built on a self-hosted Apache Solr cluster. To mitigate risks, ensure high user adoption, and achieve a fast time-to-market, the deployment was structured into clear strategic phases:
Infrastructure & Architecture Analysis: We thoroughly audited the existing system logic and features to determine which core functionalities to migrate, preserve, or deeply optimize.
Custom In-House Back Office: We engineered a modern, intuitive management interface that streamlines backend operations and simplifies the ongoing maintenance of search and category pages.
The Impact: Key Improvements at a Glance
Significant Cost Reduction
Complete independence from restrictive software licenses and full cost control as the business scales.
Enterprise Performance & Scalability
A highly resilient architecture engineered to effortlessly support new international markets, multiple languages, and surging data volumes.
Streamlined Backend Operations
Faster maintenance cycles, an enhanced operational overview, and a massive reduction in manual back-office tasks.
Agile, Independent Development
New features and optimizations can now be deployed continuously—completely independent of external vendor roadmaps.
The new search solution allows us to respond flexibly to future requirements and implement continuous improvements. This foundation enables us to incorporate innovative enhancements, such as vector search, and improve micro-KPIs. The team quickly got into the swing of things and reliably achieved the goals. The migration has given us more freedom and control over our search.
Head of Product Area, Breuninger
