FEMSA

FEMSA, a multi-sector pharmacy leader in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico, lacked the digital capacity to innovate and create modern storefront experiences for their brands — Cruz Verde, Fybeca, and Yza — due to their inflexible monolithic technology ecosystem. This limited their autonomy to update their own website content in a timely manner. Because of bulky approval flows involving an external agency, content updates could take up to 48 hours.

While adhering to the conditions of their locked-in contract with their back-end technology partner Salesforce, FEMSA aimed to improve their digital storefronts and transform the way they manage their content. In 2020, we began our collaboration with FEMSA’s team to develop a unified, easy-to-use digital ecosystem that would allow them to innovate and excel in the commerce space.

Together with FEMSA's team, we envisioned a modern and flexible solution that would decouple their ecosystem’s front-end technology from the monolithic back-end, enabling independent content delivery across platforms. The primary goal was to unify multi-country storefront experiences into a single solution and empower FEMSA's teams to manage their own content centrally.

To achieve this, we built a middleware in AWS to connect the Salesforce back-end to storefronts, allowing communication between the front-end and back-end using API technology. Then, using Contentful and atomic design principles, we established an easily manageable and scalable headless front-end experience while operating on the monolithic back-end platform.

Because Contentful could easily fetch product information from the back-end using APIs, we were able to create a component-based customizable design system for FEMSA’s various brands for a modern web experience. Additionally, our developers leveraged this design system to build native iOS and Android apps, allowing customers to connect with storefronts from any device.

Apart from brand-specific product assets, each country has its own regulations, payment, and tax systems. We ensured that FEMSA’s new platform supports specific payment methods and third-party logistics for each country, thanks to their ecosystem’s headless capabilities. To help FEMSA grow its sales further, we leveraged the new ecosystem and collaborated with Atonit, a Salesforce company, to enable a marketplace where products could be sold from other sellers or vendors.

Lastly, to keep FEMSA's multi-country users up to date with new product info and personalized promotional discounts, we integrated communication and data management tools into the platform.

Our solution enabled FEMSA to provide consistent and faster content updates that could be scaled for multiple brands through a single content management platform. This also helped introduce streamlined developer workflows for rapid prototyping and quick creation of landing pages to drive brand and country-specific experiences, empowering them to create their own digital marketing campaigns and build a loyal customer base.

As we delivered new experiences to support FEMSA's digital transformation, both our teams came together to celebrate every milestone and product launch.

We also saw dramatic improvements in revenue for October 2022 Cyber Day in Chile compared to the same event in May 2022: