Etnia Barcelona has spent 25 years building a reputation for quality and service that leaves no room for shortcuts. Warranty replacements ship within 24 hours, without exception, and opticians recommend the brand to their own customers on that reputation.
Its website did not meet the same standard. In June, after a 45-day migration, Etnia Barcelona moved to Shopify.
- More than 30 people across marketing, finance, and product now manage the site directly in Shopify, without raising a ticket with IT
- Catalog, country-by-country pricing, and orders now sync automatically with the company’s SAP system
- Digital sales grew year over year for the first time in five years: up 20% in June, 70% in July, and 136% in August
The challenge: a website unworthy of the brand
Etnia Barcelona runs on an obsession with quality and service, built over 25 years. Warranty replacements ship within 24 hours, without exception.
“If an optician has a problem with a pair of glasses, there is no question. They get the replacement within 24 hours,” Nico says.
The website did not meet that bar. It ran on a platform the company had built and maintained itself, and it showed: a checkout that stalled, payment methods that broke without warning, and pages that struggled to load depending on which country a customer was in.
“PayPal would work one day and not the next. Apple Pay worked until a certificate expired somewhere and it stopped. Google Pay never worked at all,” says Nico Nutter, IT director at Etnia Barcelona.
Etnia began 2026 with real change at the top. Massimo Vian, appointed CEO on September 1, first got involved as a consultant at the start of the year, and his argument was direct: the website’s daily operation did not match the quality Etnia delivered everywhere else, in its products and in its service.
The solution: a 45-day migration, no redesign
Nico set the terms before the project started: no redesign, no new debates about design, just move the existing site onto Shopify as fast as it could be done properly. He gave the team and Shopify partner Orienteed 45 days, and the new site launched on June 9.
“We didn’t get into new design discussions. We knew that would only delay things,” Nico says.
What had taken months on the old platform now takes minutes. Etnia runs a separate price table for nearly every country and every optician agreement, and all of it now syncs automatically with the company’s SAP system, along with the catalog and orders. When Nico needed to connect Emarsys, an SAP-owned marketing tool, he found a ready-made Shopify connector rather than commissioning a new build.
“I searched the app catalog for Emarsys, and they had a connector. It took three minutes. I called SAP and told them not to bother, it was already connected,” Nico says.
Etnia Barcelona’s founder, David Pellicer, still gets involved in small details of the storefront.
I don’t know PHP, and the owner asked for a change on a Friday evening. I didn’t want to call my team for something that could wait until Monday. I asked Sidekick. It said, ‘If you want, I’ll do it,’ and changed it itself.
For Etnia, Sidekick complements rather than replaces the expertise of the Orienteed team, enabling faster responses while keeping complex changes and ongoing improvements in expert hands.
More than 30 people across marketing, finance, and product now have direct access to Shopify to manage the catalog, pricing, and campaigns, work that used to route through IT as a support ticket. Etnia’s own technical team still owns the site, working alongside Orienteed rather than being replaced by them.
The result: quality came first, sales followed
Etnia’s technical team no longer maintains the infrastructure behind its own website. Catalog, country-by-country pricing, and order data now sync automatically with SAP, and Shopify Markets flagged a Canadian tax threshold on international shipments before it became a compliance problem, the kind of check Nico says a custom-built tool would never have caught.
“All of this, Shopify catches on its own. You would never build that into a custom tool,” Nico says.
The website is priced slightly above Etnia’s own stores, and it runs no discounts, protecting the optician relationships that still generate most of the company’s revenue. “I have a brand showcase. I’m not going to discount for anyone,” Nico says.
With Shopify, Etnia now has a real digital presence in countries where it has no physical stores yet, which gives its export team a way to see where genuine demand exists before deciding where to open next. It is also planning to move its in-store point-of-sale systems onto Shopify, to unify retail and ecommerce data the way it has already unified ecommerce and SAP.
None of this was built to save online sales. It was built because a website should be worthy of the brand behind it. Digital sales grew anyway, for the first time in five years: up 20% in June, the month of launch, 70% in July, and 136% in August. Some of that size is the old platform’s weak baseline rather than the new one being extraordinary, but the trend turning at all, after five years, is what matters most to Nico.