Two Re-Platforms in Twelve Months
by Davor Santic | 2025-04-02
Lessons from rebuilding both mybestbrands.de and stylight.de on Next.js + Elasticsearch with one shared team across two countries.
>After the ICG acquisition we had twelve months to re-platform two separate fashion marketplaces while their affiliate revenue kept the lights on. Parallel delivery was not optional.
>One shared team across Germany and Croatia ran both projects. Duplicating the org would have doubled the coordination cost without halving the work.
>Picking Next.js App Router + Elasticsearch up front let us share a data layer, a CI/CD pipeline, and most UI primitives between the two front-ends.
>We drew the seams between the sites at the domain model, not at the stack. Anything below product-search was shared; anything above it was site-specific.
>Both sites went live in March 2025. The biggest lesson: a single engineering org with one delivery pipeline beats two autonomous teams every time the work is structurally similar.