Åhléns E-commerce Modernization

About Åhléns

Åhléns is one of Sweden’s leading department store chains, offering fashion, beauty, home goods, and more. Founded in 1899, it has grown into a household name with both physical stores across Sweden and a strong online presence. The company combines contemporary trends with sustainable practices, aiming to deliver a seamless shopping experience across digital and physical channels.

Background

When I joined in 2018, Åhléns’ e-commerce platform was running on an on-premise Intershop backend with AngularJS for the front-end. The stack was becoming outdated, hard to maintain, and limited in flexibility. I was brought in to lead the front-end team and set a new technical direction to modernize the platform.

The Project

The long-term goal was to move the entire front-end from Intershop/AngularJS to a React/Next.js solution. A complete rewrite wasn’t feasible, so I designed a gradual migration strategy:

New features and pages were built in React and integrated into the existing Intershop UI.
Over time, AngularJS code was phased out and replaced with modern, maintainable components.

This allowed us to continuously deliver improvements without disrupting the live platform.

Technology

Key technologies and practices I introduced or expanded:

React + Redux for building new components and managing complex shared state.
TypeScript to bring type safety and reliability to the growing codebase.
Material UI to accelerate development with customizable, pre-built components.
JSS for styling, aligned with Material UI best practices.
Gradual adoption of Next.js for server-side rendering and performance improvements.

Team & Way of Working

I managed a team of 4–5 front-end developers, guiding architecture decisions, reviewing code, and mentoring team members. The broader e-commerce team also included product owners, UX designers, QA engineers, and DevOps.

At first, we worked in longer sprints with waterfall-like release cycles due to backend constraints. Over time, we shifted toward agile practices under SAFe, with 2-week sprints and more frequent, incremental releases. This improved collaboration and delivery speed.

Features & Integrations

During my time at Åhléns, the team delivered several high-impact improvements:

A redesigned checkout flow in React, integrated with Intershop backend.
Modernized product, category, and search pages.
Integrated Adyen as the new payment provider.
Added Ingrid for flexible shipping options.
Rolled out personalized recommendations, first with Rich Relevance, later migrating to Apptus.
Implemented Bambuser Live Shopping for interactive sales.
Integrated Flowbox to leverage social media content for customer engagement.

Impact

The modernization laid the foundation for Åhléns to compete more effectively in digital retail. The React/Next.js stack provided a faster, more dynamic shopping experience, while agile practices enabled more frequent feature delivery. My leadership helped the team transition from legacy tech and slow releases to a modern, scalable front-end that supported both business growth and evolving customer expectations.