StickerApp was founded in Lomma in 2006. In 2023 they turned over more than 400 million SEK and are today one of the world's leading players in their niche: stickers. A rapidly growing e-commerce business with its base still in little Lomma, both office and factory. Commerce Mind and StickerApp have collaborated on several successful projects during 2024 to 2025.
StickerApp was founded in Lomma in 2006, and in 2023 they turned over more than 400 million SEK. They are today one of the world's leading players in their niche: stickers. A rapidly growing e-commerce operation with its base still in little Lomma, both office and factory.
The main product they sell is stickers, designed entirely according to the customer's wishes. With several different materials and laminates, they offer nearly endless possibilities for what you can create in their editor on the site. They sell to private individuals and companies, where business customers make up the largest share. Everything is manufactured in the factory in Lomma and shipped from there to the whole world. The US is today the biggest market, and to the general public in Sweden the company is still not particularly well known despite its position in the industry.
StickerApp is a company with a culture that breathes creativity and future optimism, plenty of ideas and a desire to get better in every area. The office in Lomma has been nominated for an architecture prize and the walls are decorated with hundreds of different designed stickers, entirely in line with what you would expect from a sticker factory. Do they have any challenges? Yes of course, just like everyone else.
An interesting aspect of selling products that are manufactured on demand and do not exist until the customer decides what they should be is that there are few finished systems that fully support the business model. That is also the main reason StickerApp has developed most of its IT systems themselves; there is no point in buying an expensive system that ticks up fees if you have to make customisations on most of it anyway.
There are of course risks with this, for example accidentally building yourself into a tangled technical solution that few individuals in IT have a grip on, and even fewer dare touch.
StickerApp found themselves in such a situation in 2023, and it was starting to be time for an update. The old systems had taken them far, but were now becoming an obstacle to continuing to grow. Technical debt, annoying bugs, uncertainty when developing new functionality. The list of things that caused frustration for the business could be made long.
So where do you start? As many know, it is a jungle of platforms and choices out there, overwhelmingly many actually. There was a need to bounce ideas off someone from the outside to find the right way forward. Someone knew someone who knew someone, and that way Commerce Mind came into the picture, as an independent advisor.
Johannes Buvnäs is CTO at StickerApp and one of those with the best grip on the company's whole systems landscape. He is a driving force in renewing and improving the technical landscape.
"We have had many and long discussions internally about which steps we want and need to take in IT to move on towards our goals and create the right conditions for ourselves to keep growing. To reach a decision, it was nice to have someone from outside to bounce thoughts off. It is easy to feel alone with your problems, even though many others sit with similar concerns and decisions that need to be made.
- Johannes Buvnäs, CTO
When it comes to updating or replacing systems, it is often a matter of just deciding which end to start at, and here we chose to start with the web. Partly to get a connection to a strong CMS to free up the marketing department to work with content, but also because the web is the gateway to the other systems. By building a new solution for the web, we open up for replacing other internal systems and working our way backwards.
Early in 2024 we began the work of breaking out the frontend code and implementing a new CMS, as an enabler for StickerApp to become more nimble. By modernising the code base and building away unnecessary complexity and old bugs, StickerApp gets better conditions for further development going forward.
The implementation of Storyblok as CMS also means a shift of responsibility for creating new pages on the site from IT to the marketing department. The benefits are many: fewer intermediaries and a much more efficient process for being able to create new content for all markets.
StickerApp themselves took a big role in the design work during this project, to make sure the end result would match their needs in terms of processes, organisation and future plans. One of the driving people in that work is Pär Green, CPO at StickerApp. He sees the new CMS as a starting point for a new way of working.
"This project is for us a huge enabler for the future. We have completely different conditions now with the new CMS to succeed in keeping consistent communication with our customers and creating a more lively site with inspiring content.
- Pär Green, CPO
In this project Commerce Mind has contributed with ongoing technical and strategic advice. We have also taken the role of project manager, and reinforced StickerApp's team with more developers to enable a higher pace and add specific expertise and experience.
In parallel with the frontend project, we supported StickerApp in starting up a number of other initiatives, with the aim of gradually breaking out and improving piece by piece of the complex systems landscape, in areas such as product information, production orders and the order system. A more long-term project, where a step-by-step approach is necessary just to dare take it on at all.
Here there is also a strong dependence on key people at StickerApp, with domain knowledge that is entirely invaluable for this kind of project. That in itself is of course not unique, but it becomes even clearer when it is about breaking up an old "home-built" monolith, which in addition builds on different rules of the game than the typical systems landscape for a normal e-commerce operation, with SKUs and prices and actual things on a warehouse shelf.
It is developing to be forced to challenge old truths. You really have to have your head with you. When we manage to combine our various experiences with StickerApp's ideas and unique knowledge of manufacturing and selling stickers, that is when the really good solutions appear.
"For me, who is well versed in the details around our systems, it can easily feel overwhelming to think about starting to break up and redo things. It is about focusing on one piece at a time and daring to get help. I appreciate how Commerce Mind has taken on that task. The collaboration has worked very well and we have solved many problems as they have come up."
- Johannes Buvnäs, CTO
A couple of months into our collaboration it turned out there was a need for more development capacity to have time to reach the goal on several projects during the year.
Commerce Mind was then given the task of staffing up some of the projects with extra expertise that could form teams with StickerApp's own developers. Over all our years in the industry we have created a large and good network of individuals we have high trust in and who have shown they can deliver time and again. We managed to sign some of them and could that way drive more initiatives at the same time.
With a strong team and good collaboration we have worked together on five projects during 2024. A number continue into 2025. The one with the greatest impact in the short term is the rewrite of the entire checkout flow, where we are developing a flexible and future-proof solution that can scale in step with StickerApp's future plans.
"This past year we have taken many steps in the right direction, and it would not have been possible without bringing in competent help that wants to dig in where it is needed. It would not have worked if the consultants who came in had needed exact details of everything in advance and tasks served on a silver platter. You need to be able to take your own initiative and propose solutions, and I think Commerce Mind really has done that."
It is both fun and developing to be part of projects where there are big possibilities to make an impact. We appreciate very much the close collaboration we have with StickerApp. There is a mutual trust and desire to do good things, that will also hold over time.
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