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Maxilia is a leading Dutch supplier of personalized promotional products, specializing in high-quality custom printing for businesses of all sizes. From branded pens and drinkware to eco-friendly giveaways and office essentials, Maxilia offers a wide selection of items that can be customized with company logos, slogans, or designs. Beyond quality products, Maxilia is committed to making a positive impact as a B corp certified company, meeting rigorous standards for social and environmental responsibility. Their “Kilo for a Kilo” initiative, for instance, ensures that for every order involving new plastic, an equivalent amount of plastic is removed from the environment and repurposed into valuable materials. Now active in countries like Germany, France, and Italy, Maxilia is a go-to partner for impactful branded merchandise and user-friendly online ordering, with a strong focus on sustainability.
When Maxilia undertook the full-scale replatforming of its digital ecosystem, it faced the challenge of standardizing its operations as per modern market standards. Unlike traditional e-commerce companies that deal in off-the-shelf products, Maxilia specializes in promotional goods with custom printing. This meant managing a vast range of products, suppliers, and product variants, which involved automating and orchestrating various processes with tailored application integrations. The need to develop and manage these integrations in a scalable and unified way, naturally led Maxilia to seek a middleware solution or a next-gen integration platform like Alumio.
While evaluating potential middleware solutions as a vital component of Maxilia’s new platform, the Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) quickly stood out to them for its simplicity, usability, and user-friendliness. In a landscape filled with clunky or overly technical tools, this level of intuitiveness that Alumio displayed was one of the key reasons Maxilia chose to work with it. On a strategic level, they also selected Alumio because it enabled them to adopt a composable commerce framework for their integrations.
Before working with Alumio, Maxilia’s digital landscape was largely custom-built and entirely managed in-house. While this gave them flexibility, it created major challenges around scalability and maintenance. Every system was manually managed, and even small updates became significant undertakings.
Eventually, Maxilia started using a data warehouse (Snowflake), which was a decision that later aligned well with Alumio’s integration-first approach. However, with siloed systems and disconnected tools, processes like handling custom product design requests often took days due to the lack of real-time data flow.
By adopting the Alumio iPaaS as a central integration hub, Maxilia could swiftly and seamlessly integrate all their core systems and processes. This involved connecting their e-commerce platform (Shopware), ERP system (Exact) — which manages all the orders, products, customers, etc., and their PIM system (Sales Layer) that manages all product information. They also connected their CRM, shipping tools, specialized apps for newsletters, product images, and customer reviews. Additionally, they directly integrated their suppliers to automate stock updates and order handling.
By orchestrating these integrations via Alumio, data now flows seamlessly and accurately between all Maxilia systems and applications. Status updates, for instance, are now reflected in real time across the platform, helping teams work faster and more efficiently.
With Alumio, all our integrations run through a single hub, kind of like the trains do through Utrecht Central Station. No matter where the trains (data) come from or go, they all pass through it. It’s helping us manage and grow our integrations and process automations from one central platform”
Vincent de Wit
Commerce Controller, Maxilia
The integrations orchestrated via Alumio helps power Maxilia’s entire order-to-delivery flow. From syncing data across systems to managing complex supplier and customization workflows, Alumio ensures everything runs smoothly. For instance, when a customer places an order via Shopware, their information syncs with the CRM, billing details are pushed to Exact, and Alumio’s in-built Transformers ensure only the necessary data passes through each step. Any errors are flagged in real-time by Alumio’s automated monitoring and logging system.
Maxilia also integrated their customer journey using Alumio. Now, when a customer logs in or creates an account with Maxilia, a CRM profile is triggered. As orders arrive through Shopware, the CRM is updated, and communications from both systems, transactional emails, and informational messages are kept in sync by Alumio. While product information is managed in their PIM system and pricing is stored separately, these are combined and routed via Alumio to Shopware to display accurate, variant-based listings online. Behind the scenes, orders may be split across suppliers, each with unique lead times. Alumio manages the calculations and triggers needed to meet promised delivery dates.
Furthermore, to future-proof their data, Maxilia also uses Alumio to extract and send operational data to Snowflake, their central storage layer. In the past, using all-in-one SaaS solutions meant that if you stopped using them, you also lost the data stored in them. Storing crucial data in their data warehouse ensures long-term control and insight, even if third-party tools change.
Alumio has become an essential enabler of Maxilia’s integration strategies, whether that involves launching shops across new markets or reusing existing connections for faster expansion. While Maxilia no longer builds and maintains every connection manually, Alumio’s unified oversight ensures data flows reliably, transformations stay consistent, and changes across systems can be managed with minimal disruption. It’s not just about faster turnaround times, but about building a digital ecosystem that's “composable” enough to change and adapt to what's next.
