How SDG engineered Mattel's commerce on Shopify Enterprise across multiple years and stages, taking American Girl, Mattel Shop, and Mattel Creations from an initial Commerce Components foundation to a full headed storefront, and delivering the entire Mattel–Contentstack CMS integration end to end.
Innovation is at the heart of Mattel. We first worked with Shopify on a project called Mattel Creations, a platform for creators to reimagine the most iconic toys in the world. It was hugely successful, and we're excited to transform our brand offerings using Commerce Components.
Overview
Mattel is a leading global toy and family entertainment company and the owner of one of the most iconic brand portfolios in the world, from Barbie and Hot Wheels to Fisher-Price and American Girl.
Mattel was among the first enterprise retailers to adopt Commerce Components by Shopify, the modular offering that lets large brands compose the pieces of Shopify they need into their own architecture. SDG engineered the commerce experiences across Mattel's direct-to-consumer brands, American Girl, Mattel Shop, and Mattel Creations, over a multi-year, multi-stage program that began on Commerce Components and matured into a full headed Shopify Enterprise storefront.
The challenge
Mattel had been moving from a monolithic stack toward a modern, service-oriented architecture, and needed a commerce foundation that could scale across many brands and markets, and evolve in stages, without locking the business into any single way of working.
- Multiple high-profile direct-to-consumer storefronts, each with its own brand standard, on one shared foundation.
- Regular high-volume flash sales and product drops that had previously strained legacy infrastructure.
- Content that needed to be authored once and reused across global markets, rather than rebuilt storefront by storefront.
- A best-of-breed stack: Shopify Enterprise for commerce, an enterprise headless CMS for content, tied together cleanly behind a headed storefront.
The solution
SDG delivered Mattel's storefronts on Shopify Enterprise as a headed build, and delivered the entire integration between Mattel and Contentstack, the headless CMS that powers content across the experience. The work ran over multiple years and stages: it began on Commerce Components by Shopify, then matured into a full headed Shopify Enterprise storefront.
That integration is the connective tissue of the whole program. SDG architected it end to end so Contentstack drives the content layer of a headed storefront running on Shopify's commerce engine.
- Commerce engineered across American Girl, Mattel Shop, and Mattel Creations on a shared Shopify Enterprise foundation.
- A staged path from Commerce Components to a full headed Shopify Enterprise storefront, evolved over multiple years without disrupting live trade.
- The complete Mattel–Contentstack integration, built by SDG, with product data sourced from Mattel's PIM, published into Contentstack, and enriched for the web.
- A content model that extends Shopify's native product schema, letting authors merchandise, categorize, and publish once across global markets.
- Management of non-product content, banners, and page experiences alongside the catalog, so business teams can move quickly without engineering for every change.
- An architecture built for daily flash sales and drops, scaling on Shopify's infrastructure rather than spinning up bespoke servers per sale.
Results & impact
Mattel now runs a leaner, more nimble commerce ecosystem: a headed Shopify Enterprise storefront where new experiences ship quickly, content is authored once and reused across markets, and high-volume sales run on Shopify's infrastructure rather than fragile, purpose-built systems.
Mattel Creations began the relationship and proved the model. From there, across a multi-year, multi-stage program, Mattel extended Shopify across its brand portfolio, starting on Commerce Components and maturing into a full headed build. SDG engineered the commerce experiences and built the Contentstack integration that ties content and commerce together.