ERP Rollout and Shop Migration at I-CLIP

Starting point

I-CLIP is a brand of Flux Design Products GmbH — slim wallets and card holders, “Made in Germany,” distributed worldwide through their own shops and a network of authorized distributors. Premium positioning, small unit numbers per variant, high margins — a business model that lives on precise stock and clean distribution.

When we started at I-CLIP, the tech landscape looked like this: Shopware 5 as the online shop, an older warehouse program for inventory, Excel for international distribution, a separate database for gray-market control, and accounting at the tax advisor. Five islands, no shared data model. Orders were exported from the shop into Excel, manually entered into the warehouse program, and reconciled with accounting at the end of each month.

The problem wasn’t that it didn’t work. It worked — but at the price of one person being effectively full-time on shuffling data between systems. And Shopware 5 was approaching official end-of-life: no security patches, increasingly incompatible plugins, and an upgrade to Shopware 6 would have cost roughly as much as a migration to a new platform.

Discovery & blueprint

We started with a two-day on-site discovery workshop — sales, warehouse, accounting, and management at the same table. Three insights from those two days shaped the entire architecture:

1. The source of truth must be the ERP, not the shop. Stock, prices, conditions, customer master data — all in the ERP, everything else pulls from there. If the shop is the leading data source, every data error multiplies across all channels.
2. DACH mid-market needs DACH software. weclapp is built in Karlsruhe, has a native DATEV interface, and understands B2B wholesale, condition management, and multi-warehouse logic — exactly what I-CLIP needed for international distribution.
3. Gray market is its own problem. A sold item has to be traceable back to the order — but the workflow must not mean any additional work for shipping. The solution had to be minimally invasive.

The result was a blueprint with three clear building blocks: weclapp as ERP backbone, Shopify as the new storefront with full SEO transfer from Shopware 5, and a slim connector to the gray-market database that automatically marries the label to the order on dispatch.

Implementation

The ERP rollout ran in three phases over sixteen weeks. Phase 1 was master-data migration: products, customers, suppliers, open orders, historical stock. We exported the data from the warehouse program, reconciled against current stock, and imported it cleanly into weclapp — with a clear mapping from old to new product numbers.

Phase 2 was process setup in weclapp itself: order intake, fulfillment, dispatch, invoicing, DATEV handover. We modeled the international distribution with condition chains, multi-warehouse logic, and country-specific tax rates. Training ran in parallel — each role (sales, warehouse, accounting) got its own two-hour session with the system they would actually use.

Phase 3 was Shopify and the gray-market connector. The shop migration ran behind the scenes: Shopify installation, theme build, product sync with weclapp via REST API, redirect map from old Shopware URLs to new Shopify URLs (for the SEO transfer — the single most important technical measure of the whole migration), and finally the live switch over a weekend.

The gray-market connector is deliberately small: it listens for the dispatch event in weclapp, takes the label number and the order, writes both into the gray-market database. That’s it. No UI, no reports, no extra workflows — the database already existed, it’s now just being filled automatically instead of by hand.

Result

Today I-CLIP has one single truth across all stock and orders — whether an item is sold via the shop, a distributor, or directly B2B. Duplicate data entry is abolished. The person who used to be full-time on shuffling data between systems now has time for the work she was actually meant to do. And the SEO transfer was so complete that organic rankings did not collapse after the shop migration — which is the exception in replatforming projects of this size.

What we particularly like about this case: it’s not a high-stakes transformation project. We did not transform I-CLIP’s business model — the brand knew very precisely what it was and what it needed. We laid the foundation cleanly, abolished the islands, and solved the gray-market question with the smallest possible intervention. That’s the kind of architectural work we show up for.