Working With Tony’s Chocolonely– A Real Treat

When you get the opportunity to work with a big-name brand, it’s always exciting. When you get to work with a big-name brand that sells chocolate, you quite literally jump at the chance. Now that our project with Tony’s Chocolonely is live, we can finally tell you all about it.

“Wolfpack provided clarity from day one, laying out a thorough solution before any development began. This approach reduced uncertainty, improved the quality of deliverables, and made working together a great experience.”
Philip, IT Business Partner for Digital and Ecommerce, Tony’s Chocoloney

Re-platforming For Scale

Tony’s Chocolonely, known for its ethical and delicious chocolate, faced mounting challenges with its legacy ecommerce platform. The custom front-end solution, which integrated with backend order management, proved difficult to maintain and scale, resulting in rising costs and complexity. In short, they needed a platform that could scale with the growth they were experiencing, add features easily, and reduce operational headaches like load times and maintenance downtime. Tony’s Chocolonely was determined to create a future-proof solution with the help of best-in-class tools. This led to a move to Shopify and the integration of Wolfpack’s Omnichannel Retail Platform (ORP).

Smart Solutions To Complex Challenges

Tony’s Chocolonely’s business moel presented unique challenges that demanded smart solutions. With eight third-party logistics providers (3PLs) handling different fulfillment types – ranging from personalized and bulk orders to small-scale deliveries – Wolfpack's ORP served as the true middleware, consolidating data and processes to ensure accurate stock management and routing. This centralization minimizes over-sales and helps Tony’s efficiently manage their complex inventory.

“ORP allows us to maintain order routing logic within the platform itself, reducing the need for external integrations to perform calculations. This keeps things straightforward and scalable.”
Philip, IT Business Partner for Digital and Ecommerce, Tony’s Chocoloney

Some of the key achievements in the project included:

• ORP became Tony’s single source of truth for stock, sharing data between countries and SKUs while maintaining flexibility in how stock is handled across distribution centers.
• Customized logic in ORP allowed precise routing based on zip codes and specific product types, streamlining the customer fulfillment journey.
• Tony’s SKU management became more efficient, as ORP facilitated bundling and splitting SKUs for order fulfillment across different 3PLs.

A Partnership Built On Trust And Collaboration

Throughout the project, Wolfpack’s approach prioritized collaboration and adaptability. Ron, Wolfpack’s Lead Architect, led a comprehensive specification phase, ensuring all complexities were accounted for before development began.

“From our kick-off with vendors to our spec sessions, we focused on identifying and documenting potential issues. This groundwork allowed us to build confidently and efficiently.”
Ron de Ridder, Lead Architect, Wolfpack DCS

The results speak for themselves: Tony’s Chocolonely’s digital ops are more stable and scalable than ever before. Already the new infrastructure has demonstrated what it's capable of when the UK market experienced a spike in orders and everything functioned as needed to cope with the influx of orders.

There’s already a detailed roadmap of upcoming developments to further grow the support elements of the system and in the meantime, we’re working closely with Tony’s Chocolonelyto work on some of the edge cases that are naturally identified once a project is live.

All in all, this has been a poster project for us. We got to work with a brilliant client with a real vision as well as a team that was open to discussing options and working toward the best solution. It doesn’t get much sweeter than that.

Got a legacy platform that you need to bring up to speed? Want to make your omnichannel presence even greater? Get in touch with Wolfpack today to see how we can help.

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