We were nobody's first choice back then. It was 2017. We had just gotten our first couple of Adobe certifications, a small team in Tbilisi, and not much of a track record to show for it. Ready for business, just hadn't proven it yet.
Then we got lucky. The owner of Druckerhaus24, a German office hardware retailer, happened to be on a hiking trip in Georgia. Somehow the conversation turned to Magento, and he mentioned the mess his store was in. We mentioned we'd just gotten certified. No pitch deck, no sales call. Just a conversation on a trail.
The store they handed us
Druckerhaus24 was running a Magento 2 store with multiple domains and storefronts, eBay and Amazon integrations, and a custom ERP holding it all together. Sounded like a serious operation. In practice, the store was in rough shape.
Their previous developer had been expensive. German market rates for Magento expertise will do that. So they tried outsourcing to a cheaper team in India. That brought the costs down, but it brought other things too. The codebase filled up with spaghetti code. Quick fixes stacked on quick fixes. Modules that did the same thing three different ways. Integration logic scattered across files with no clear reason. By the time Druckerhaus24 reached out to us, nobody had a clear picture of how everything fit together.
Starting small
We started with support. Tickets, bugs, keeping the lights on. Nothing glamorous. But as we dug into the codebase, we found layers of technical debt causing most of the recurring issues. Patches on top of patches. Custom modules fighting each other. Integration code nobody wanted to touch because the last person who tried brought the eBay sync down for two days.
So we started cleaning house.
Cleaning up
Over the following months we worked through the worst of it. Refactored the eBay and Amazon integrations so they actually ran reliably. Untangled the ERP connection. Removed dead code, consolidated duplicate logic, fixed things that had been "known issues" for so long the team at Druckerhaus24 had stopped reporting them.
The store stabilized. Our role shifted. We weren't just fixing things anymore. Druckerhaus24 started asking us which extensions to use, how to approach new features, whether a particular upgrade path made sense. We went from support vendor to the team they called before making technical decisions.
Then Hyva came out
A few years in, Hyva came out. It's a frontend framework that replaces Magento's notoriously slow default frontend with something actually fast. Most agencies were cautious about it at the time. Migrating a single store is one thing. Migrating a multi-domain, multi-website setup with years of custom frontend work is a different conversation entirely.
We did it. One of the first successful Hyva migrations for a store of that complexity. Page load times dropped to around one second. Druckerhaus24's customers noticed.
Eight years and counting
Eight years later, we're still working together and still growing together. They've expanded their business. We've grown from that small freshly certified team into a full agency. Druckerhaus24 cut development costs by roughly 3x compared to what they were paying before, got more hours out of the arrangement, and ended up with a faster, more stable store than they started with. And that conversation on a hiking trail turned into our longest running partnership.
Why this works
Hiring senior Magento developers in Germany is expensive and slow. Managing them adds overhead. For a mid-sized retailer, the technology budget can disappear into salaries before anyone writes a line of code that moves the business forward.
Working with an external team flipped that. Direct access to developers who know the system, no recruitment cycles, no management layers. When something breaks on a Friday afternoon, there's someone who already knows the codebase picking it up.
It's not for everyone. But for a merchant who needs real Magento expertise and doesn't want to build an internal team around it, it's a pretty straightforward deal. You work with the developers directly. They know your store. Things get done.