When rethinking its digital commerce landscape a few years back, Essity—a global leader in hygiene and health with $12B in annual revenue and operations in 150 countries—set a clear goal: to overcome the organization’s historical fragmentation and deliver a stronger, more unified customer experience by building a single platform with SAP Commerce Cloud.
The company is well on its way to achieving this goal: not by following the status quo, but by taking strategic risks and making bold choices.
The team leading the CX project was formed out of Essity’s global digital transformation program, which involved migrating from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA — an ongoing overhaul that started in Europe and will continue in the United States. “We have multiple ERPs that are being consolidated as part of that program,” explained Daniele Tedesco, eCommerce Global Process Owner at Essity. “Why not add business value onto that by overhauling the commerce and the service?”
Starting from the ground up
For years, Essity had been operating separate B2B and B2C e-commerce solutions, each developed in response to different business needs—some exacerbated by the pandemic, others by evolving customer expectations. This patchwork approach led to a scattered technology landscape, making it difficult to scale, innovate, or deliver a seamless customer experience.
To address this, Essity decided to rethink its approach from the ground up. The team started with an agile mindset, aiming to build reusable, scalable templates that could serve both B2C and B2B models. The vision was to create a flexible foundation that could adapt to different business needs while maintaining consistency and efficiency. The result? Two distinct templates: one for B2C and one for B2B.
The company’s strategy now rests on three pillars:
- Streamline processes through an integrated, future-proof solution.
- Speed up go-to-market with a shared platform and code base.
- Deliver seamless customer experiences across Essity’s brands and channels.
A dual-track approach
Building Essity’s new commerce platform in parallel with—and ahead of—the SAP S/4HANA ERP rollout proved to be a strategic advantage for Essity. Rather than waiting for the ERP transformation to reach every market, the team listened to urgent business needs—especially in the U.S.—and accelerated the launch of modern commerce solutions through which they could most efficiently deliver value to the business. “If we had followed the original program, rolling out where S/4 was, we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the business value in such a timely manner,” said Kiet Nhu, IT Manager at Essity.
With strong leadership support, Essity’s commerce platform rollout was able to move faster than the ERP program in key areas, delivering incremental wins and a modern customer experience without reinvesting in outdated legacy systems. By setting clear thresholds for when to launch and ensuring that new solutions could be integrated with the ERP when it was implemented, Essity balanced speed with long-term sustainability. Ultimately, this approach allowed the business to benefit from a unified, customer-centric front end much sooner, while still aligning with the broader transformation roadmap.
Modern CX for both B2C and B2B
Essity’s B2C platform is now well-established and rapidly expanding, with seven markets live since the first launch in the Nordics region in 2021. The company’s strategy centers on reusable, scalable templates that can be quickly deployed across markets, enabling aggressive growth. One example of this strategy in action came through the TENA brand; with its platform in place, Essity was able to start operating direct-to-consumer webshops for TENA incontinence products.
This strategic evolution honors the TENA brand’s promise of discretion, offering reliable integrations with logistics and payments, real-time shipping updates, and a frictionless user experience. Importantly, the new system also accelerates rollouts, reducing timelines from 6–9 months down to just 4–8 weeks.
Essity launched its new B2B platform in the United States in April 2024 to support two business units. Both run on the same commerce engine and subscription model, demonstrating how a unified platform can flexibly support very different business requirements.
The new platform integrates seamlessly with SAP’s ecosystem—including S/4HANA, SAP Customer Data Cloud (CDC), SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI), SAP Service Cloud, SAP Product Information Management (PIM), and others. This integration enables streamlined order capture, real-time tracking, secure payment, and GDPR-compliant data protection.
Essity’s health and medical B2B platform also transformed its previously basic ordering system. “What we had in the U.S. was a basic experience where a customer enters product IDs,” explained Tedesco. “The [product detail pages] PDPs lacked quality JPEGs and enriched product content. It was built for purpose.”
Essity’s e-commerce team was pressing for more than a system that’s “just there for purpose,” Nhu added. “But our business understands that modernization and user experience is key. That's why we made a change.”
The new e-commerce experience, which Essity created with a full-stack solution using the Spartacus Angular-based JavaScript storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud, offers visually appealing product pages, intuitive navigation, and advanced ordering features tailored for business users, such as quick line-item additions, easy reordering, and bulk Excel uploads. This blend of B2C-style design with robust B2B functionality streamlines the purchasing process and better meets the needs of pharmacies that order products like socks, garments, and wound care items, which are then shipped directly to patients.
Just eight months after launch, in December 2024, the company achieved 10,000 orders in one month — the highest in the site's 10-year history. By February 2025, approximately 50% of all orders were digitally generated. By replacing a basic, outdated system, customers have access to a B2C-style interface with rich graphics, detailed product pages, and enhanced search capabilities. Place orders and reorders is quick and easy, checkout is streamlined, and they can do bulk uploads for mass orders—making the entire process faster, more intuitive, and better suited to the needs of business customers.
For its professional hygiene business, Essity also adopted a headless architecture, optimized for large truckload orders. While sharing the same backend as health and medical, this architecture serves very different ordering patterns. The headless approach allows a common team to maintain the robust backend capabilities needed for large-scale B2B operations while providing flexibility to meet the specific requirements for hygiene customers.
Looking ahead, Essity’s next plans to expand its omnichannel foundation, use AI to boost productivity, improve logistics, and scale to more markets. The company plans to be live in 25 markets (13 B2C and 12 B2B) by mid 2026.
Prerequisites and recommendations
In reflecting on their success, Essity leaders emphasized the importance of having a well-aligned tech stack before starting any major e-commerce initiative. According to Tedesco, having foundational systems in place—such as PIM and Digital Asset Management (DAM)—was crucial for success. Teams that lacked these elements often struggled, especially when forced to convert from paper catalogs or build digital systems mid-project.
Tedesco and Nhu also noted several organizational strategies that have been key to their overall success. Securing executive buy-in early and maintaining it throughout each project was essential, as was structuring initiatives as capital investments to gain stakeholder support. Their recommendations:
- Create a global leadership board for strategic decisions and budget approvals.
- Treat the e-commerce platform as an asset, not just an expense.
- Deliver incremental wins by targeting areas of highest business value, even if that means moving ahead of larger-scale projects, such as ERP rollouts.
- Maintain a six-month threshold to avoid investing in legacy systems close to ERP go-live.
- Focus on change management by restructuring teams around the customer journey, updating KPIs, and helping business units understand the value of modern customer experience.
Essity’s e-commerce transformation has ultimately been about meeting customers where they are. According to Tedesco, “We wanted to have the understanding and knowledge of what a modern customer experience looks like. We know professional buyers have expectations. We're all buying stuff on Amazon. That’s why we wanted to establish the B2C foundation first, then shift to building it for B2B.”