If you work in IT leadership at a large manufacturing company with multiple brands, such as Lippert, you know the feeling of wrangling dozens of separate websites, legacy systems, and custom codebases held together by endless manual hours.
The business wants a unified customer experience. Marketing wants brand consistency. And you are wrestling with the technical trap: a complex, costly, and inefficient infrastructure that actively prevents growth.
The solution is a multi-brand tech consolidation. This isn’t just about updating your tech. It involves building a unified foundation that supports your entire organization, including multiple brands, in the most efficient way possible.
Let’s talk about why this challenge is so common, the true cost of doing nothing, and the strategic path forward.
TL;DR:
- Fragmented systems drain IT time, inflate costs, and slow launches.
- Technical debt kills scalability and future growth.
- Consolidation isn’t about one platform, it’s about a shared, modular foundation.
- Integrated systems and shared frameworks restore speed and control.
The cost of digital fragmentation: Why IT is feeling the pain
For B2B manufacturing giants, the system at large is often the starting point for any digital transformation. While the goal is a seamless customer journey, the reality behind the scenes is usually anything but seamless.
Managing a diverse portfolio means managing diverse technologies. Every time one of your brands spins up a new website, acquires a smaller company, or demands a custom feature, a new digital silo is created. Eventually, the cumulative effect hits your IT budget and your team’s morale:
The technical debt mountain
Technical debt is similar to the concept of sunk-cost fallacy. You’ve already invested in the tech, so now you feel like you’re stuck supporting custom-built solutions and poorly integrated technologies. The invisible cost is that you keep throwing money, time, and effort at a poor solution. Just like a bad relationship, you might feel like it’s a waste to start over, so you keep trying to fix it and make it work.
For multi-brand businesses, this mountain grows steeper with every disparate system you maintain. This debt not only blocks innovation but also increases the risk of platform failure. As our Lippert case study shows, decreasing technical debt is often the number one requirement for successful transformation.
Operational inefficiency is killing your time
When systems are disconnected and data is fragmented, internal workflows crumble. Think about the manual processes needed just to sync product information or track orders across different brand platforms. We frequently see IT and internal teams wasting 20–30% of their time on manual data handling. This is a massive drain on resources that could be (and should be) focused on strategic projects.
Slow time-to-market
While the turtle wins the race in Aesop’s classic fable, the market today expects your products to hit the market at the speed of a thousand hares. But when your technical architecture is a tangled mess, launching a new feature, integrating a newly acquired brand, or rolling out a simple site update becomes a huge, multi-system project. The complexity means development is slow, costly, and risky. You lose the race because you simply can’t move fast enough.
The blocked path to scalability
Your current setup might handle today’s load, but can it handle tomorrow’s growth? If ever you decide to launch a new business model, and take your B2B business down the D2C route, or a major acquisition comes along, fragmented infrastructure just cannot adapt quickly or cost-effectively. It simply doesn’t have the modularity or flexibility needed for future expansion.
The solution: Building a unified, future-proof technical foundation
Here’s the deal: solving the puzzle of multi-brand consolidation requires so much more than replacing one website, one platform, or bulldozing all your websites onto one platform. In order to be cost-effective and the right fit for your organization, you must define and implement a comprehensive technical strategy at the group level.
Our focus is on creating an architecture that supports both your IT needs (efficiency, stability) and the business needs (consistent experience, growth). Keep reading to discover the core pillars of our approach to helping multi-brand companies
The core engine(s): Your digital commerce platform(s)
Every multi-brand enterprise needs a powerful, consolidated core for trading. We build this foundation using leading enterprise platforms like Adobe Commerce, commercetools or Shopify Plus.
As groups evolve, their needs change. Migrating to the appropriate platform enables multiple brands to trade online efficiently. This migration is often necessary once complexity reaches a critical mass across brands and global markets. Remember that just one platform might not be the best choice for your tech stack; our client Lippert’s solution featured both Adobe Commerce and Shopify Plus in their tech stack! Every multi-brand business is unique, and we ensure that we find the right fit for your company.
Strategic solution development & architecture: Making plans
Well, a strategy and good intentions aren’t enough to install a platform; you’ll need a blueprint for that. We design a scalable, modular architecture that serves multiple brands and business units simultaneously.
This involves in-depth technical roadmapping and stack analysis to make sure we meet specific brand requirements while maximizing technical efficiency across the entire portfolio. We offer detailed analysis to help senior technical leaders weigh the pros and cons of approaches, including the potential for composable architectures, which allow for flexibility and faster innovation down the line.
System integration: Wave goodbye to data silos
We won’t leave your new platform high and dry! We seamlessly connect the new digital platform(s) with your critical backend systems: ERP, PIM, CRM, and OMS.
You’ll start seeing major operational efficiency gains during this phase. By connecting the online commerce stack to your wider business systems, you ensure a complete solution that automates manual processes and eliminates data silos.
Shared technical frameworks: Time for efficiency
Things should be looking real efficient right about now! This is when we develop shared infrastructure, codebases, and shared site frameworks.
Creating better core code reduces technical debt, minimizes bugs, slashes maintenance time, and significantly increases the speed-to-market for new developments. When all your brands are built on the same high-quality foundation, development efficiency hits an all-time high.
Expert technical consulting: Let’s talk about it
Senior technical leaders often face several viable, yet complex, options for the future direction of their data and technical roadmaps. Our expert technical consulting provides strategic guidance on platform strategy, API development, headless architecture, and data modeling. We offer the broader perspective needed to help CTOs and VPs of IT confidently choose the direction that best supports long-term business goals.
Moving forward: From complexity to confidence
IT is in charge of managing complexity, but we can’t let that complexity stall the business.
At Vaimo, we help you map your strategy and we are your implementation partner that builds and integrates the necessary technical solutions. We are the technical experts in implementing complex digital commerce and experience solutions for large, multi-brand enterprises, with over 15 years of experience. Our track record with companies facing consolidation challenges, like Lippert and Dometic, proves our ability to handle challenging IT puzzles.
By focusing on scalability, efficiency, and reducing technical debt, we ensure that the technical foundation we build supports your team, improves operational performance, and ultimately enables the beautiful, consistent customer and brand experiences the business side is aiming for.
Check out how we helped Lippert replace their sprawling technical debt with a unified platform that works best for their business needs.
Want to learn more about multi-brand hacks? Join us for our Multi-Brand Strategies Masterclass in January!
