Burrow's agile eCommerce solution to manage product inventory with over 20,000 variations

Snapshot

Named one of the 10 most innovative retail brands by Fast Company, and recognized among the 50 best inventions of the year by TIME, Burrow is a direct-to-consumer eCommerce furniture company from the US, headquartered in New York.

As the company and product line began to scale, the Burrow team decided to opt for a flexible tech stack to support the backbone of their eCommerce experience. Their first requirement was to have a backend-as-a-service – storing the complex product array and information ranging from SKUs, product dimensions, variations, and customizations. Secondly, the team needed to create page structures that could easily populate static content for the website.

Having previous experience with headless commerce systems, the team saw the benefit of building a composable architecture that was high-powered, flexible, and scalable.

The Process

The Burrow team sought a single system that was flexible enough to serve both purposes: a BaaS that allowed for structured content, and one which was powerful enough to accommodate their ambitious pace of scaling.

For instance, the engineering team wanted a powerful system – one that could model complex data within the UI and serve as a performant API, meeting their needs as BaaS.

Whereas the marketing team needed the flexibility to run marketing campaigns – all without needing to involve the development team in making content changes.

Why Hygraph?

Ultimately, the Burrow team chose Hygraph for the following reasons:

Intuitive Schema Modeling

The flexibility of content modeling within Hygraph, as well as GraphQL relation types, enabled the team to use Hygraph as a data-rich repository for their catalog content. This means they can use Hygraph as a product management system instead of a traditional PIM. Burrow created highly complex data modeling structures and content with over 20,000 variations of their core product line using flexible content models.

In addition to the static website content, backend notifications, shipping notifications to the user, and product availability estimates are also handled via Hygraph.

GraphQL Content APIs

Hygraph’s GraphQL APIs made it possible for the development team to migrate content programmatically and update changes to product arrays and inventory. Using Hygraph’s Query API, Mutations API, and Management SDK, Burrows’s high-velocity content needs and changes are handled programmatically. This eliminates manual work for the development team and ensures that the end-user is always seeing the most accurate data.

Editor-friendly UI

The Hygraph UI allows Burrow the flexibility to deliver features the Burrow team needs to build optimized workflows at scale. Building a schema using the Hygraph schema builder is straightforward even when its teams are dealing with complicated data sets.

The marketing team is able to create page templates using the schema builder to manage marketing campaigns and iterate content. The clean Hygraph UI makes it simple for content managers to quickly make changes to content without needing to involve the development team.

The Current Setup

Given Burrow’s digital-first approach and exceptional in-house technical resources, they were fully committed to a best-in-class approach using MACH-compliant microservices and approaches. Currently working with React, BigCommerce, GraphQL, and Express.js, the Burrow team built a strong foundation for the future as they continue to grow.

As a result of their efforts, the Burrow team now has a scalable infrastructure using best-of-breed services to complement their business model, and are able to maintain high-quality and high-performance user experiences with shorter content creation timelines, even when working with complex data models.