Tonies' frontend architecture, powered by Vercel, Next.js, and Contentful, has driven huge business value and improved UX and DX.

Tonies, creators of the smart audio system for children, sought to expand into new markets, but it became clear that their existing platform couldn't support this growth. In response, they undertook a strategic transition to a new frontend platform powered by Vercel's Frontend Cloud and Contentful's CMS.

The team at Tonies was previously operating with two separate tech stacks: a very custom PHP CMS setup that integrated Commercetools for their online storefront, and a React single-page app hosted on AWS. Embracing a modern React-based headless stack across their entire web presence was important in enabling the merge of teams into a unified web team that shares common tooling and UI resources while operating with fewer team members.

Link to headingImprovements in UX and DX

Vercel's Frontend Cloud quickly produced a number of benefits. By using Vercel's Preview Deployments, the Tonies team vastly improved their development, continuous delivery, and quality assurance processes. The ability to test login and payment functionalities in Preview Deployments expedited QA processes, ensuring robustness and reliability in new releases.

With almost all pages prerendered on the server side and delivered from Vercel's CDN cache, Tonies significantly reduced latency, greatly improved scalability during peaks (like Black Friday), and enhanced the user experience. Additionally, Vercel's Monitoring and Logging tools empowered the team to gain deeper insights into application performance and expedite their debugging processes.

Link to headingThe business impact

Adopting Vercel has had a profound impact for Tonies. First, they were able to migrate to their new tech stack quickly and iteratively, minimizing disruptions to business operations and end users. As part of their migration, Tonies scaled from serving two markets (Germany and the UK) to expanding into four markets with remarkable ease.

Notably, Tonies witnessed tangible improvements in conversion rates following the migration, underscoring the efficacy of their strategic shift. The team was able to transition from very infrequent deployments (sometimes more than a month apart) to a cadence of multiple deployments per week to provide fresh updates and features to their users.

With these advancements in place, Tonies is well-positioned not only to scale within Europe, but also to extend its reach beyond European markets. This successful transition underscores the importance of selecting robust frontend solutions like Vercel's Frontend Cloud.