How Cocunat shifted from platform maintenance to business building

Cocunat is a Spanish natural beauty brand selling online and across four retail stores in Barcelona, Madrid, and Zaragoza. For years, the brand ran its entire commerce stack in-house—custom backend, frontend, checkout, and warehouse. When the cost of maintaining that infrastructure outweighed the value it created, Cocunat moved to Shopify. Since then, the team has redirected engineering capacity toward the work that actually drives competitive advantage—across every channel.

With Shopify, Cocunat achieved:

• Technical team streamlined to 5-6 focused on strategy vs. 12-15 on infrastructure
• POS setup time dropped from "really painful" to 1-2 hours per location
• 20+ international markets managed without engineering projects
• 50% less time on operational issues, 50% more on strategic work

The challenge: Every improvement cost more than it should

Cocunat built its early commerce infrastructure entirely in-house. For a while, that made sense. The brand had the engineers, the ambition, and the appetite for full control. As the business scaled, the cost of that control compounded.

Keeping the foundation stable consumed engineering time—not building what differentiated the brand. With a fully custom backend, frontend, checkout, and warehouse, every change meant more development cycles, more testing, more risk. The custom checkout compounded this: with no external reliability backstop, any issue in that part of the funnel hit revenue directly.

With four physical stores operating across Spain and a growing international footprint, the limitations of the custom stack became impossible to ignore. Connecting those locations to the online business—shared inventory, unified customer data, consistent checkout—would demand the same build-it-yourself effort that was already consuming the team. More engineers. More overhead. None of it strategic. The path to unified commerce was blocked by the very foundation the business was running on.

The solution: Standardize what should be standard

Cocunat evaluated multiple options. Shopify won on a specific trade-off: proven, stable infrastructure for the things that should just work—checkout, payments, tax, shipping—so the team could stop rebuilding fundamentals and start building where they could win.

The migration was completed in 2022 by Cocunat's internal team, faster than a typical enterprise replatforming. Shopify's checkout replaced the custom-built version, removing the reliability risk that had sat at the center of their conversion funnel. The app ecosystem changed the build-or-buy equation: most capability extensions now come from existing solutions rather than custom development.

For Cocunat's growth ambitions, the impact extended well beyond the online store. Running four retail locations alongside the digital business—with pop-up stores added in Madrid and Barcelona depending on campaign timing—no longer required a separate engineering effort. The team now operates both channels on the same platform, with the same data, without the custom integration work that would have consumed them on their previous stack.

International expansion followed the same pattern. Shopify Markets gave the team the ability to configure and manage 20+ markets without a technical project for each one. Decisions that once required engineering—entering a new country, adjusting market presence, shifting focus between regions—are now made at the marketing or commercial level and executed in hours.

The result: Engineering time redirected to what compounds

The clearest measure of the shift is headcount. When Cocunat ran a fully custom stack, the technical team numbered 12 to 15 people. Today, it runs at five or six. The difference isn't lost capacity—it's recaptured focus. Core maintenance no longer dominates the sprint. The work that does—data quality, customer experience, retention products like subscriptions, building on integrations like Klaviyo—is where Cocunat builds competitive advantage.

The team has also changed shape. With a stable commerce foundation, Cocunat has been able to hire more creative roles—designers, people focused on building beautiful things—rather than engineers keeping systems running. The nature of technical leadership at Cocunat shifted accordingly. Jose now spends roughly half the time he once spent on operational worries and minor issues. That time is now available for new ideas, cross-functional impact, and the kind of work that moves the business forward.

The POS rollout tells the same story. Setting up a new Shopify point-of-sale location—users, configuration, hardware—takes around one to two hours. For a brand planning two additional stores in Spain and exploring international pop-up formats, that's not a technical project. It's an operational decision. With past platforms, the same process was, in Jose's words, really painful. Now the technical aspect is reduced to zero.

Klaviyo sits at the center of Cocunat's customer data strategy—and the Shopify integration is, in Jose's terms, non-negotiable and untouchable. Shopify data flows into Klaviyo cleanly, enabling the marketing team to build personalized experiences across online and in-store customers without technical barriers. Non-technical teams operate independently. The integration effectively becomes self-service—people are free to do things without waiting on engineering.

Shopify Analytics rounds out the foundation. As a headless implementation, Cocunat manages its own frontend—but Shopify Analytics is built into the platform and used extensively for acquisition analysis, retention tracking, and comparing new versus returning customer behavior. Fast access to live data without additional tooling or setup.

The shift is structural, not incidental. Cocunat's technical team is smaller where it doesn't need to be large, and focused where it does. The foundation is stable. The team is building.