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Vondels is an Amsterdam-based brand known for their exquisitely crafted glass ornaments: collectible, design-led pieces sold through a global network of wholesale retailers. When they came to us, they were running two separate legacy webshops and their visual identity hadn't kept pace with where the brand had grown. We came on as a full-stack partner: refreshing their branding, designing a new website from the ground up, and migrating everything to Shopify Plus. The result issignificantly less operational overhead, no more managing two separate systems, and a team that can run their wholesale business from a single platform.
TL;DR Vondels, an Amsterdam-based gifting brand, was running two fragmented legacy webshops and a brand heavily focused on Christmas, while the brand has grown into a broader gift offering. GoodKarma delivered a full brand refresh and a custom Shopify Plus migration simultaneously — parallel cart system, bidirectional ERP integration, and a new visual identity — resulting in 14% B2B revenue growth and a near-silent support inbox.
+14% B2B revenue vs. prior year
3 legacy webshops replaced by 1 unified storefront
Near-silent B2B support inbox post-launch
Selling across 46 countries from one platform
Full brand refresh delivered alongside the migration
Vondels is an Amsterdam-based gifting brand founded in 2015 by Loesje Donner-Raedts and Yan Xu. What started as a Christmas ornament brand — handcrafted, mouth-blown glass pieces sold at De Bijenkorf, Selfridges, Harrods — had grown into something bigger. Ten years in, Vondels was expanding into tableware, homeware, and giftware for every occasion. The brand had outgrown its identity, its platform, and its own origin story.
They came to Good Karma for help with all of it.
The brief had two parts, and they were connected.
The first was commercial. Vondels was running three webshops — one for B2C, and two for B2B, one of those for preordering the next season and the other for placing direct orders for the current season. B2B buyers had to choose which shop to enter at the start of every session, and switch back and forth between them, depending on what season they wanted to order. The result was friction and missed revenue: buyers placing a stock order often didn’t even know that a new preorder season was live.
Internally, any front-end change hit all 3 shops at once, which meant the team spent their days troubleshooting instead of selling. "My day to day work was more troubleshooting than actually optimizing," says Dewi Dekker, Ecommerce Manager.
The second was identity. Vondels' brand identity is rooted in their heritage Christmas offering. The visual language, the positioning, the tone — all was focusing heavily only one season. But the business had the ambition to add more nuance to their brand and broaden their offering into more seasonal celebrations and year-round gifting. They were already selling Easter ornaments, tableware, champagne coupes, giftware for birthdays and celebrations year-round, but the brand identity wasn’t reflecting that story.
Both problems needed solving before Vondels could grow.
GK ran the brand refresh and the Shopify migration as one integrated project. The thinking was that launching a new brand on a broken platform — or a new platform with an identity stuck in the past — would undermine both.
The brief was sharp: Vondels wanted to expand their positioning without abandoning what made them. While Christmas would always remain at the heart of the brand, its gifting collection needed to feel relevant beyond the festive season as well.
GK worked through multiple identity routes with the Vondels team, landing on a system built around contrasts that feel distinctly Vondels: bordeaux and hot pink. Structured fonts paired with a handwritten accent. A star logomark recontextualised for year-round use rather than holiday-only. The result is a brand that reads as premium and playful at the same time — edgy enough to feel fashion-adjacent, warm enough to sell a gift.
The platform decision was Shopify Plus. The client team had a reasonable question: Shopify is known for B2C. Could it handle a business that runs almost entirely on B2B wholesale, seasonal preorders, and a deep ERP integration?
The answer was yes — with the right build.
The most structurally complex piece was the parallel cart system. Vondels' buying cycle means that they are selling multiple season’s collections at the same time, each season with its own pricing strategy, payment terms and delivery timeline. We built a system where every buyer session runs two carts side by side. Buyers browse all seasons on the same storefront, add to either cart and check out for each cart separately.
Behind the storefront, we built a custom bidirectional middleware hosted on DigitalOcean connecting Shopify to Vondels' ERP, Exact Online. Exact Online is the source of truth for everything: tier pricing, customer classifications, product visibility by market, VAT codes, and payment terms. The middleware handles the full data translation in both directions — Shopify reads from EO, Shopify writes back to EO — without requiring manual reconciliation on either side.
On top of that: a custom B2B registration and approval workflow with VAT verification, agent routing by country, and a trade show express path. Dynamic shipping cost calculation by customer type and delivery country. Multi-market VAT handling across B2C and B2B. Market-specific product visibility across 46 countries.
The thing that made this work as a project was not doing brand and platform separately. The design decisions and the commerce decisions were made in the same conversations. The storefront UI was built to the new brand system from the start. When Vondels launched at Christmas World — the gifting industry's largest trade fair — they launched a brand and a platform at the same time.
B2B revenue increased 14% compared to the prior year. With stock and preorder visible in the same session, buyers stopped missing the next season. The revenue that had been leaking between multiple webshops was recovered.
The support inbox went quiet. The daily operational issues the old setup generated stopped almost entirely after launch. "Our B2B sales support team used to be overloaded with critical issues coming in from the websites. But now it's silent, which is a good thing. Our customers just know what to do," says Natasja Erftemeijer, Brand, Ecommerce & Marketing Manager.
With the B2B infrastructure stable, the team has room they didn't have before. B2C — underdeveloped for years while the platform was a problem — is now the next focus.
Brand and platform are not separate decisions. Rebuilding a commerce infrastructure while running an outdated brand identity on top of it is a half-solution. The two projects reinforce each other — or undermine each other. Running them in parallel, with one team holding both, removes that risk.
Complex B2B requirements are a solvable problem on Shopify Plus — with the right implementation. The brands most likely to assume Shopify can't handle their complexity are often the ones with exactly the kind of problem a well-built custom middleware and a partner who understands wholesale can fix.
This case study was also featured by Shopify at shopify.com/case-studies/vondels.