Case Study: GraphCMS, SportScheck, and Fitfox

GraphCMS allowed us to create different type of content (fitness studios, events, sport items) in a very short period of time and, at the same time, the webhooks and the GraphQL API made it possible to get an easy layer on top.

Antoine VergerCTO at Fitfox

Fitfox is the innovation arm of SportScheck, a Germany-based sports equipment and clothing retailer with over 1600 employees. The company’s vision is to become a sports activity platform – the booking.com of sports.

Project Overview

Fitness-on-demand is the most important trend in the activity and sports industry right now. Fitfox and SportScheck are launching a new product – the Pulse Club. The Pulse Club mobile-first web application is a loyalty program with exclusive benefits like clothing and equipment discounts and personalized recommendations for sports articles and activities. It also offers a free ticket SportScheck RUN, free access to a gym and free delivery of SportScheck goods. Moreover, members have an exclusive access to SportScheck articles from brands like Nike, Adidas, FitBit and Under Armour.

GraphCMS is used for managing the entire content architecture of the mobile application:

• Products
• Sport Activities
• Events
• Taxonomies and Menus

The team, led by Antoine Verger, CTO of Fitfox, follows the principles of agile product development. Rapid development cycles, modular architecture and strict product KPI monitoring are the foundation of their work.

The team was firmly against building their own CMS from scratch. The total cost of ownership of having GraphCMS in their stack was much lower and without the associated risks of maintaining a complex system on your own. The team was free to fully invest in features that are directly related to SportScheck's core business. GraphCMS offers an extremely flexible API that can satisfy any custom content modeling and API design needs.

GraphCMS was also a perfect fit for the SportScheck team’s technology stack which includes the JavaScript framework React and the Static Site Generator (SSG) Gatsby. React’s component structure and development performance make it the preferred frontend of choice for many companies. Each GraphCMS project connects to the frontend (and to other systems that can consume a JSON feed) via a GraphQL API. Both GraphQL and React were specifically created to solve the problems of managing structured content in an easy to understand way. In addition to the unparalleled developer experience in setting up applications, the speed of content delivery is ensured by GraphQL’s property protecting against over-fetching of content or unnecessary round-trips in data fetching.

More about why GraphCMS is the best React CMS.

Why GraphCMS?

The key technology trend that Antoine Verger identifies is the need for a software product to be “an ecosystem player”. An application’s content should be available via a flexible API. Other services will certainly need to access it – for either adding a specific functionality via another microservice, or for powering a new product in the future.

• GraphCMS is a great fit for projects involving React and Static Site Generators like Gatsby.
• GraphCMS offers an extremely flexible API that can satisfy any custom content modeling and API design needs.