Case

Strategic frontend advice for 123inkt.

From in-house monolith to a widely supported composable architecture

How a capability scan laid the foundation for the frontend transition of one of the Netherlands' largest e-commerce players.

The Challenge.

123inkt grew into the market leader in office supplies such as ink and toner with an extremely successful webshop. That success has run for years on an in-house platform (Symfony/PHP with its own frontend framework, DRuid), and that is exactly where the organisation hit its limits:

Maintenance tax: the frontend team spent increasingly more time maintaining DRuid, leaving less time for building features. Separate templates for desktop, mobile and other labels tripled the work.
Recruitment and dependency: the current stack does not match what modern talent is looking for, and knowledge of the platform sits with a handful of people. That makes hiring difficult and creates dependency.
Tight coupling: frontend, commerce and backend are so tightly bound that teams have to wait on each other. Rolling out a new design, as with a new label, took a year.

The frontend of the in-house monolith had reached its ceiling. Renewal is essential to accelerate innovation, recruitment and international growth.

123inkt engaged Breakfast to objectively map the situation and to explore whether moving to a frontend framework would be the best direction for the future and, if so, what impact that would have.

The 123inkt.nl webshop shown on a laptop — The 123inkt webshop: a commercial success for years thanks to technology that keeps evolving, with a clear roadmap for the next phase.

Our approach.

Our approach separates gut feeling from facts, and facts from direction. In three phases we took 123inkt from diagnosis to an actionable plan:

1

From gut feeling to facts: we started with seven interviews across the organisation (leadership, IT and marketing) and translated them into a capability snapshot. This 'honest picture' objectively mapped the bottlenecks and risks across business, technology and organisation.
2

From analysis to a supported direction: in two co-creation workshops we defined a North Star (business agility) together with the team and weighed up to three future scenarios against each other. A framework-fit matrix underpinned the technical choice.
3

From direction to an actionable plan: we developed the chosen direction into a phased roadmap with preconditions, and built a business case together with 123inkt for management decision-making.

Stuck with a legacy platform too? We guide organisations from objective diagnosis to a supported direction, independently and without a hidden agenda.

Our approach

Project facts

Stakeholder interviews

Co-creation workshops

Phases in the roadmap

~4 mo

Total timeline

The Result.

Within four months there was a direction supported by the entire organisation, from leadership to development team:

Supported scenario: a unanimous choice for a composable, API-first architecture with a modern frontend that structurally enables team autonomy, recruitment and international growth.
Low-risk roadmap: a phased plan following the strangler fig principle. The webshop stays live throughout the entire rebuild, and we start with a foreign shop rather than the Dutch flagship.
Substantiated business case: the benefits, from an expected velocity gain of 20 to 30% to risk mitigation on talent, are translated into a clear decision framework for management.
A way of working that delivers: a model with a Sweeper team and a Run team that resolves complex choices ahead of time, so the project keeps up its pace and delivers value continuously.