— CASE STUDY · GÖSSL
Gössl. A luxury fashion brand, rebuilt and run from the inside.
Luxury handcrafted Tracht since 1947.
CH.1 / 5 · THE BRIEF
The brief.
Gössl has been making traditional Austrian clothing in Salzburg since 1947 — wool walkjacken, dirndls, linen shirts — sold in its own retail shops and online, from a catalogue of thousands of SKUs. The online shop was a Magento build that wasn't converting. The brand was strong; the online shop and the plumbing behind it were not carrying it.
The brief: move the online shop from Magento to Shopify, keep Intex — the ERP where every product is created — as the source of truth for the catalogue, and rebuild the sync between them so it stops failing quietly. Direct engagement with the team in Salzburg — no intermediary, no two-month discovery phase.
CH.2 / 5 · THE WORK
The work.
I redesigned the online shop directly in the build, section by section, with the team reviewing on a live preview as it took shape. No mock-ups, no big-reveal moment: a working online shop getting more correct each day.
The catalogue logic is the hardest part of any heritage commerce build. Gössl variants are tiered by size — a larger wool walkjacke costs more than a smaller one in the same colour and fabric. Shopify does not model this natively. I built it on the metafield layer, exposed it through the theme, and wrote the ERP sync to keep it honest.
The catalogue is born in Intex B2X, the Austrian retail system behind the retail shops. Intex stays where products are created and remains the source of truth for the catalogue. The online shop moved off Magento onto Shopify.
The bridge between them is mine: Cloudflare Workers carrying the catalogue from Intex into Shopify on a schedule — master records, variants, prices — and reconciling the two every night. Drift is logged. Silent failures are not allowed.
The new online shop went live in April 2026. Average order value held — Gössl is not a discount brand and the rebuild was not allowed to make it feel like one — but conversion and sales moved on a different scale.
The plumbing held. The team in Salzburg works the way they always have, and the online shop keeps up with them. That was the project. What follows is the part that did not end at launch.
CH.3 / 5 · THE NUMBERS
The numbers.
III.Conversion rate, against the previous online shop on Magento — from 0.01% of visits to 1.5%, bots excluded.
Online sales, against the monthly average of the Magento years. Average order value held; the volume moved.
CH.4 / 5 · KEEPING IT RUNNING
Keeping it running.
Launch was not the finish line. Since then I have kept the online shop running — storefront, catalogue, sync, campaigns — while the team in Salzburg and in the retail shops sells, packs and ships. An extension of the Gössl team rather than a supplier beside it.
Since the tills moved to Shopify in July 2026, the retail shops and the online shop work from the same stock. A customer can see which retail shop has a piece in their size, order it online to collect there, or have it sent from whichever retail shop has it on the rail. Returns run through a portal with a prepaid label.
A wholesale shop for the trade opened online on the same platform, with its own prices behind a login. And in August 2026 the online shop got a second design: a design agency set the direction with a handful of pages, and I built the rest of the online shop from them and iterated live — from inside the running operation, with the catalogue and the sync untouched underneath.
This is not a project with an end date. It is an operation: the same person who built the online shop keeps it running, changes land small and live, and the numbers are read the next morning. Gössl decides where the brand goes and handles every order. I make sure everything behind the online shop keeps working.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
The interface between an extremely complex ERP system and a modern Shopify shop has already pushed many developers to their limits. Not so Stephanie: she built our online shop single-handedly and to the highest professional standard. Every step was carefully thought through and structured — an approach that is now paying off for our customers too, and shows in significantly higher sales.
IT systems are not our core business. Yet we need them, and someone who brings us up to date and keeps us there in a time shaped by rapid technological leaps. In Stephanie we have found a competent partner who understands us and delivers what we need. She has proven that impressively around the online shop and the structuring of the processes behind it, and she has given us an appetite for more. Now we look forward to taking the next forward-looking steps for our company together with Stephanie.
CH.5 / 5 · BEHIND THE ONLINE SHOP
Behind the online shop.
Behind the online shop the plumbing has become simpler since launch, not more elaborate. The middleware that once sat between Intex and Shopify is gone; the bridge runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers, and the checks that used to be spread across several systems run in one place. Stock that drifts, a sync that stops, an online order waiting too long in a retail shop, a product that could go live at the wrong price — each has a check, and each check reports before a customer would notice. Most mornings the report is short.
As Gössl has reduced the third parties around the online shop, the work has come to me. The returns platform is giving way to a returns portal I built. The newsletter tool gave way to a programme I run. A design agency handed over a handful of pages; the rest of the storefront I built and still iterate. One partner with the whole picture instead of several suppliers holding a slice each.
I do this with AI agents I built for the purpose. They read the data of the online shop every day, draft what needs drafting and flag what needs a person. They do not touch a customer, an order or a price on their own; the decisions stay with Gössl and with me. Part of the work now is building the context of the business itself — how the house works, what its people know, what it means by its own words — written down so that a person or an agent can work from it. Everything around the online shop is documented that way, and in the next phase the Gössl team will work with agents of its own.
The role has grown with the work. Today I hold the seat a company this size would otherwise give a CTO — a partner-level role the Gössl family asked me to take on — with the online business as my brief and the whole company as the context. That is the part I find most exciting: a house that has made Gwand since 1947 is deciding what its next decades look like, and I am looking forward to building what that takes, with the family, from the inside.
— END OF CASE STUDY
If you're a heritage brand or luxury-lifestyle business with a real product and a long time horizon, the online shop I built and still look after for Gössl is the kind of work I'd do for you.
Send a short brief through the form and I reply within two working days. I take on three or four engagements a year; the next start is winter 2026/27.