How Sleepo built a stack that scales without the overhead and adapts to a future no one can predict. 

Sleepo was founded in 2011 by Philip Nickolsten as an online bed retailer. Today, Sleepo is evolving into a design-led D2C furniture brand, combining its growing collection of proprietary designs with a curated selection of established brands across nine European markets. International markets account for a significant and growing share of revenue, and with a team of just 18 people, scalability is critical to Sleepo's business model.

Sleepo runs on Norce Commerce, with Nexer as solution partner and the team behind both Owlstreet and Connected Commerce. 
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As the company expands its own-brand assortment and grows internationally, the technology needs to absorb increasing complexity without requiring the organisation to grow at the same pace.

When Sleepo expanded into more markets and added more specialised systems, the architecture became increasingly complex to develop and maintain. Changes often required coordination across several parts of the stack, limiting the speed at which the business could adapt. In a technology landscape moving faster than ever, that flexibility has become increasingly important.

"With AI, it's very hard to see more than a few months ahead technically. You really want the flexibility to choose the right path forward, not be locked into something just because you've already made a big investment in it." 

 Philip Nickolsten, Founder & CEO at Sleepo

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A composable architecture gives you the freedom to choose the right component for each job and replace it when something better comes along. That freedom is the whole reason to build this way. What it costs you sits between the components. A prerequisite for a successful composable strategy is a well-oiled integration setup where orders sync, prices update and stock levels don't drift.

"With AI, it's very hard to see more than a few months ahead technically. You really want the flexibility to choose the right path forward, not be locked into something just because you've already made a big investment in it."
Philip Nickolsten, Founder & CEO at Sleepo

Sleepo needed an architecture that could support growth without adding unnecessary complexity. Together with Nexer, Sleepo built a composable commerce stack designed to make both integration and change easier.

 

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At the centre sits Norce Commerce, managing the core commerce logic across 15,000 SKUs and nine markets. This includes advanced market-specific pricing and competitive price matching across Sleepo's external brand assortment.
Norce PIM provides the structured product data that the rest of the ecosystem depends on.

"With this magnitude of products and markets, combined with fairly advanced pricing, Norce is a very good system," says Philip.

Around that foundation, Nexer's Owlstreet integration engine connects the different components of the stack. Built specifically for ecommerce, Owlstreet provides pre-built connectors for the systems that matter and a real-time visibility into how data moves between all of them. According to Nexer, custom integrations that would typically require 200 hours can be reduced to around 20.

"You can see very quickly that something went wrong and what went wrong, and then fix it," says Philip. "That's a real advantage, because troubleshooting across five different systems is fairly hopeless sometimes."

"With this magnitude of products and markets, combined with fairly advanced pricing, Norce is a very good system."

"Going forward, it will be easier for us to choose our own direction and make sure the technology adapts to our needs, rather than the other way around." 

Philip Nickolsten, Founder & CEO at Sleepo

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Sleepo also moved to Connected Commerce, Nexer's headless storefront framework, with Storyblok as the CMS, which gives editors a live preview as they build. Its modular architecture means individual components can evolve without requiring the entire storefront to be rebuilt.
The wider ecosystem includes Voyado for customer data, search and recommendations, while payments are handled through Norce Checkout with the Svea connector. Together, the setup gives Sleepo a flexible commerce foundation designed to scale and evolve as the business and technology landscape change.

"With this magnitude of products and markets, combined with fairly advanced pricing, Norce is a very good system."
Philip Nickolsten, Founder & CEO at Sleepo

For Sleepo, the value of the new architecture is not only what it enables today. It's the freedom it creates for tomorrow.

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Adding and managing markets becomes more scalable, with a shared content structure that can be translated and adapted locally. Evaluating a new component doesn't have to begin with a major integration project. And the business can continue evolving its stack without replacing the foundation every time its requirements change.

That matters for a company with ambitious growth plans and a lean organisation.

"Going forward, it will be easier for us to choose our own direction and make sure the technology adapts to our needs, rather than the other way around," says Philip.

Sleepo is still early in this next phase, and we'll follow up with results as the new setup develops. But the foundation is in place: a commerce architecture built to grow, and flexible enough to adapt to whatever comes next.
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