Emanuel Berg: maintaining and developing a menswear brand’s Magento store

Emanuel Berg is a premium menswear brand that has been making shirts from Italian cloth in its own European atelier since 1989. Its range includes shirts, knitwear, polos, blazers and jackets, as well as made-to-measure tailoring. The brand sells through partner retailers and online, including through a Magento 2 store.

In January 2024 the brand asked us to take care of maintaining and developing the store. The store was slow, and the infrastructure and deployment processes left by the previous vendor were too complex for the scale of this Magento instance. We started by simplifying and organizing the process, and then for 13 months developed the store end to end: marketing, cookie consent and analytics, and stock level logic.

A newsletter that rewards sign-ups with a discount code

The brand grows its mailing list in FreshMail. We connected Magento to it and wrote our own newsletter module. Customers sign up in a popup or a form on the page, accepting the required consents. The store checks in FreshMail whether the address is already subscribed, subscribes the customer in Magento, and when syncing with FreshMail generates a single-use discount code for them based on a cart price rule selected in the admin panel. The code goes into a field in FreshMail, so the welcome e-mail contains a discount assigned to that one person.

The popup and the form are widgets: marketing sets the title, description, consent text, post-sign-up message and whether the popup should be shown to logged-in customers. We disabled Magento’s default newsletter e-mails so customers don’t get two messages, and we send every sign-up to the dataLayer as an event that marketing measures in Google Analytics 4.

For the business this means a growing mailing list, an incentive for the first purchase and codes that cannot be passed on, because each one works only once.

Product availability that matches the warehouse

Stock levels reach the store through an import of an XML file from an FTP server. The problem was that the “in stock” status did not always keep up with the quantity. We wrote a module that after every order and every import calculates the real quantity available for sale: the stock level minus reservations from open orders and the configured minimum threshold. When the quantity drops to zero, the product is taken off sale. When goods come back, the product returns to the offer on its own.

When an issue with stock levels not changing after an order was reported in November 2024, the fix reached production the same day. A few days later we removed the second cause: the import did not match products when the SKU in the file differed in letter case.

For the business this means fewer cancelled orders, fewer disappointed customers and no manual monitoring of availability.

Technology in the background

The store runs on Magento 2 Open Source with the brand’s theme, and the testing environment runs in Docker containers. The code lives in GitLab, and deployments to the testing environment are handled by a GitLab CI pipeline with an Ansible playbook. Our extensions are four Magento modules in PHP and JavaScript, integrated with FreshMail, Google Tag Manager and GA4. Have a store built by another team and looking for a partner to develop it further? See how we handle platform maintenance and development, or let’s talk about your project.