The world’s best-selling toy needed a world-class e-commerce platform

Almost everyone has tried to solve the Rubik’s Cube, the most popular puzzle game in history. It looks so easy: Just twist the plastic cube until its six coloured faces line up and you’re a winner. But the cube can be rearranged in 43 quintillion different ways, making it a time-consuming, frustrating pursuit. The same could be said of Rubik’s old e-commerce solution. Not long ago, Rubik’s webstore was running on ExpressionEngine, but they found the back end was complicated and inflexible. Rubik’s had big ambitions to boost their direct-to-consumer business and expand into new countries. But with e-commerce, you can’t cheat by peeling off the coloured stickers. They needed a new solution.

“We needed a scalable solution that would allow the company to expand its business overseas, with a high level of flexibility,” says Fabrice Druelle, Rubik’s eCommerce and Digital Marketing Director. The iconic brand enjoys massive organic traffic — mainly from frustrated players looking for tips on solving the puzzle. To capitalise on that traffic and turn casual visitors into repeat customers, the 44-year-old puzzle brand needed a state-of-the-art e-commerce solution. Druelle, who had experience with Adobe Commerce from his days at the luggage company Antler, had the answer — they’d migrate Rubik’s to Adobe Commerce.

Rubik’s had just a few months before the busy holiday shopping season, when toys and puzzles are in high demand and they run global promotions with companies like McDonald’s in France. To ensure that they beat their deadline, Rubik’s hired Best Response Media, not just because their logo happens to look like a Rubik’s Cube, but because the British solution partner specialises in launching brands on Adobe Commerce. “It was a no brainer,” explains David Wain-Heapy of Best Response Media. “Adobe Commerce is the best-in-breed solution for Cloud. And why wouldn’t you want to host your solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS)? The managed infrastructure takes away the headache so the Rubik’s team can focus on other challenges — like marketing — instead of server management.”

The e-commerce solution of the future

The Rubik's cube was invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian architect, who was trying to create a model to explain three-dimensional geometry. After finishing his “magic cube,” Rubik was surprised that he couldn’t solve the puzzle. “It was a code I myself had invented!” he wrote. The toy made its debut at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979 and was licensed to the Ideal Toy Corp in 1980. By January 2009, it had sold more than 350 million units worldwide and had become a worldwide phenomenon. Today, the latest Rubik’s craze is speed-cubing, the sport that challenges players to solve the puzzle in record time (the record is 4.22 seconds).

Speed was of the essence for the Rubik’s implementation — thanks to Adobe Commerce, they produced load-times of less than one second. They added zoom functionality on product pages, a mega menu, sticky menu and a promo-code engine to drive marketing campaigns. They also built some tutorials with rich media content to show customers how to solve their puzzles.

From the outset, Adeel envisioned both shops built around an API-based or “headless” commerce model hosted in the cloud rather a template-based solution. Headless commerce uses automated programming interfaces (APIs) as a flexible communication layer between the front and back end of a website. This eliminates creative constraints and accelerates development of the brand experience across multiple touchpoints through the buyer’s journey.

“Our first integration phase was pretty lightweight,” says Druelle. “We integrated with two warehouse stock management systems, one ESP, MailChimp and the HighStreet.io feed management solution.” With Express Checkout and Braintree, customers now can make a purchase on a drop-down basket, without even visiting a checkout page. Best Response Media lightly customised the standard checkout with a postcode look-up field at the top, to make the address field a breeze, slashing their basket abandonment by 30%.

Next, they moved onto global expansion, easily spinning up new international sites and landing pages in various languages and currencies. “No other solution could make it this easy to go global,” says Wain-Heapy. “Shopify can’t handle the international component. You have to have a physical store for each country and on the back end it’s an administrative nightmare, you have to log into each country. You need more people to manage it.” For the small team at Rubik's, Adobe Commerce allowed them to launch shops in France, the EU and UK, all with one easy back end. Now the team can easily manage regional promotions from one central administration dashboard.

“We deployed Adobe Commerce in a very short period of time and with very little resources,” says Druell. “It’s a robust solution that has laid a strong foundation for the digital future of the business.”

An enriched experience with an enticing checkout

The whole project took four months and was ready in plenty of time for the holidays. The Rubik’s customer experience moved from a pure catalogue-based site to an enriched experience with rich content, features and a simple, enticing checkout. The brand saw a significant increase in Average Order Value from £12.00 ($15.30) to £17.00 ($21.67) — and their conversion rate doubled.

“The flexibility of the Adobe solution helped us to deploy three instances of our sites in three different regions very easily,” says Druelle. In fact they’re launching an U.S. store as well. “They wanted a scalable site that was easy to manage with a low admin cost,” says Wain-Heapy. “Rubik’s got a solution that supported their growth plans.”

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