Drastic reduction in time-to-market when opening new markets
High availability—even during traffic peaks—guaranteeing a seamless customer experience
Reduced operational complexity
Cost optimization
Time savings and increased agility for marketing, ecommerce, and IT teams
Supporting international growth, My Jewellery modernized its ecommerce architecture with Google Cloud. Using Apigee, Cloud Run, and BigQuery, the brand connects logistics, absorbs traffic spikes, and ensures a seamless experience during major marketing campaigns.
Supporting international growth, My Jewellery modernized its ecommerce architecture with Google Cloud. Using Apigee, Cloud Run, and BigQuery, the brand connects logistics, absorbs traffic spikes, and ensures a seamless experience during major marketing campaigns.
In the fashion industry, everything moves incredibly fast. A trend can emerge on social media in the morning and trigger a massive spike in orders just a few hours later. Influencer campaigns follow one another, collections are rapidly renewed, and brands must be capable of reacting almost in real time.
Founded in 2011 by Sharon Hilgers as a simple passion project, My Jewellery operates at the heart of this frantic pace. Driven by a highly engaged community and an omnichannel strategy blending jewelry, clothing, accessories, ecommerce, physical stores, and social networks, the company has become one of the most dynamic fashion brands in the Benelux region. Today, its success is even extending to Germany, France, and Spain.
This rapid growth gradually put a strain on the company's technology environment. Initially designed to support a smaller company primarily operating in its domestic market, the legacy system—hosted on a traditional infrastructure based on dedicated on-premise servers—was clearly not scaled to absorb exponential traffic volumes, increasingly viral marketing campaigns, and a growing number of integrations with logistics partners, marketplaces, and country-specific payment solutions.
Building a modern commerce platform is about much more than infrastructure. It's about creating a flexible technology foundation that enables continuous innovation. By leveraging Google Cloud's managed services and embracing an API-first architecture, we've increased our operational agility, simplified integrations, and established a platform that can scale with our international ambitions.
Vilmar Bliekendaal
Chief Technology Officer, My Jewellery
We had reached a point where our architecture was holding back our expansion. We needed a more agile and responsive environment, capable of quickly integrating new partners without adding complexity to the platform. [...] Our goal was simple: deploy to new international markets in a matter of weeks rather than months.
Maarten Bos
E-commerce Manager at My Jewellery
When technical debt becomes a barrier to growth
In practice, My Jewellery was facing two major technical challenges. On one hand, the company was forced to over-provision its infrastructure to handle traffic spikes, which became increasingly expensive as it expanded. On the other hand, the technical architecture still relied heavily on point-to-point integrations and a relatively monolithic logic.
Consequently, each new connector added to integrate a new marketplace, logistics provider, or payment solution created new dependencies between systems. Over time, this approach spawned an increasingly complex ecosystem that was difficult to maintain and evolve.
The slightest modification could trigger a cascade of issues. In an industry where everything hinges on speed and a frictionless customer experience, this rigidity posed a growing risk to the brand's ability to sustain its growth.
"We had reached a point where our architecture was holding back our expansion," confirms Maarten Bos, Ecommerce Manager at My Jewellery. "We needed a more agile and responsive environment, capable of quickly integrating new partners without adding complexity to the platform. We also needed greater flexibility in scaling up to secure the customer experience while keeping our costs under control. Google Cloud stood out because of the richness of its managed services and the overall coherence of its offering, which perfectly aligned with our transformation strategy. Our goal was simple: deploy to new international markets in a matter of weeks rather than months."
Apigee has become the true backbone of our architecture: it allows us to standardize and automatically orchestrate exchanges between our various internal services and external partners, such as international marketplaces and our third-party logistics (3PL) providers. This enables us to integrate new players much faster without multiplying custom developments between systems.
Maarten Bos
Ecommerce Manager, My Jewellery
Apigee and Cloud Run powering an agile and scalable platform
Initiated in 2018, the transformation aimed for an ambitious goal: to evolve a historically monolithic architecture into a much more agile, modular ecosystem. To achieve this, My Jewellery opted for a complete overhaul of its platform. To be able to evolve each component individually without impacting the rest of the system, the company executed a strict separation between its public storefront (front-end) and its back-end, which was restructured around an in-house developed ERP and PIM, adopting a microservices and API-first approach in the process.
Also designed on the same principles, the storefront relies on Nuxt and Vue, open-source technologies that significantly accelerate page load times, especially on mobile devices. "This is a critical issue for us," emphasizes Maarten Bos. "In a world where a large portion of traffic and purchases is now generated directly from social media, everything is decided in seconds. If it takes too long to load, you lose the customer. Pre-generating pages on the server side also improves organic search ranking (SEO), which is a particularly strategic lever for boosting our brand's visibility in new markets."
To enable the different building blocks of its new architecture to communicate, My Jewellery uses Apigee, Google Cloud's API management solution. "Apigee has become the true backbone of our architecture: it allows us to standardize and automatically orchestrate exchanges between our various internal services and external partners, such as international marketplaces and our third-party logistics (3PL) providers," explains Maarten Bos. "This enables us to integrate new players much faster without multiplying custom developments between systems. In other words, Apigee gives us greater agility, stability, and speed of deployment."
While more agile with integrations, My Jewellery still had to tackle another major challenge: instantly absorbing traffic peaks generated by viral campaigns and collection launches.
This transformation has profoundly changed our approach to ecommerce. Modern retail demands total immediacy and interconnection. With Google Cloud, we finally have a platform capable of evolving as fast as our brand. Technology is no longer the bottleneck of the business; it is its engine.
Maarten Bos
Ecommerce Manager, My Jewellery
To address this, the company relies on Cloud Run for workloads subject to heavy variations in load. Thanks to Cloud Run's serverless approach and autoscaling features, resources automatically adjust according to real-time activity.
Finally, My Jewellery leverages Google Cloud's data services to increase responsiveness and better manage its business. The company uses Cloud Storage to manage its multimedia content at scale, while BigQuery enables continuous analysis of sales data and customer behavior to more rapidly adapt its commercial offerings, marketing campaigns, and the ecommerce platform experience.
Setting course for Europe…
Armed with the agility, resilience, and scalability of its new platform, My Jewellery now approaches its international expansion with far greater confidence—a confidence it was already able to test during the brand's last major commercial peak.
"During Black Friday, we were recording orders every single second," recalls Maarten Bos. "Thanks to the combined power of Apigee and Cloud Run, stock fluctuations were reflected in real time on our storefront. Is a piece of jewelry or clothing out of stock? It disappears instantly from the site. As a result, even at the peak of traffic, we maintained a perfectly smooth purchasing experience across all our markets, with no stock desynchronization or critical platform slowdowns."
This robustness in the face of cross-border peak loads triggered a second shift—this time cultural—within the company itself. Infrastructure is no longer perceived as a constraint or a source of anxiety, but as a genuine business accelerator. Marketing, data, and ecommerce teams can now launch much more ambitious campaigns, quickly test new markets, and deploy to new countries in just a few weeks.
"This transformation has profoundly changed our approach to ecommerce," concludes Maarten Bos. "Modern retail demands total immediacy and interconnection. With Google Cloud, we finally have a platform capable of evolving as fast as our brand. Technology is no longer the bottleneck of the business; it is its engine."
In just a few years, My Jewellery has become the number-one fashion jewelry brand in the Benelux region. Present online and through a network of brick-and-mortar boutiques, the company offers jewelry, clothing, and accessories to a fast-growing international community. With nearly 1,000 employees, My Jewellery is currently pursuing its European expansion with a clear ambition: to offer a seamless, inspiring, and accessible brand experience across all markets.
Industries: Retail, Fashion, Ecommerce
Location: The Netherlands
Products: Apigee, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Google Drive
