Smooth Sailing with Headless: How Ponant Cut Time-to-Market by 83%

• Headquarters: Marseille, France
• Technology Stack: Next.js, Magento, Bynder, Prediggo, MaPs, ExpressJS
• Implementation Partner: AKQA

For Ponant, a world leader in luxury expedition cruising, the expectation of quality goes beyond the voyages themselves — it spans the entire customer journey. From exploring remote destinations in the heart of the Amazon or the Poles, to savoring the elegance of five-star French hospitality onboard, to a customer’s first digital encounter with the brand — every touchpoint is designed to feel exceptional. 

As Ponant continued to expand globally, the team realized delivering digital experiences that matched the luxury of its onboard experiences would require a content ecosystem that could adapt and scale with the business. Marketers needed greater autonomy, developers needed a more modern, flexible architecture, and the organization needed a central content platform capable of supporting fast, consistent delivery across markets. 

The team was in search of a tech stack that could support their goals from the inside out, and they set their sails towards a more composable content future. One that would transform how its team creates, manages, and delivers content globally — with the support and expertise of its implementation partner, AKQA. 

Anchored by monolithic tech

Ponant’s setup with Magento 2 for the frontend and backend, and WordPress for the CMS, added more complexity and cost than value. 

The WordPress–Magento integration (via FishPig) tightly coupled content to the frontend, so most updates had to be coded rather than edited visually. External partners handled the majority of updates, while internal developers maintained the connector, managed upgrades, and oversaw infrastructure — a setup too heavy to keep pace with Ponant’s digital ambitions.

The challenges

1. Slow time-to-market: Launching content and campaigns often took days or weeks with WordPress, limiting agility and delaying marketing initiatives. 
2. Developer-dependent workflow: Tight coupling between the CMS and frontend meant non-technical teams needed developer support for content updates or running conversion rate optimization (CRO). 
3. Higher costs: The cost of external service providers hired to manage semi-technical content on WordPress, along with the maintenance costs of the Magento platform connector, quickly mounted. 
4. Excessive CMS maintenance: Their WordPress CMS setup required ongoing, dedicated maintenance for development and updates, taking up developer time. 
5. Fragmented multi-channel content management: Different systems managed content across channels and locales, leading to inconsistent user experiences, complex workflows, and frequent workarounds. 
6. Limited content reusability: WordPress’s monolithic templates made modular reuse and content creation generally more difficult and resource-intensive. 
7. Web performance difficulties: Heavy page load times negatively impacted web performance and made ongoing optimization more difficult. 
8. Losing talent to the tech: The outdated tech stack made it harder to attract developer talent seeking a modern, flexible tech stack. 

Evaluation and procurement: Ponant’s CMS checklist

It was time for Ponant to chart a new course towards a modern, flexible content ecosystem that enhanced cost and team efficiency, reduced developer dependency, and unlocked scalability and speed-to-market for the future. Starting with clear criteria of what their new setup had to deliver: 

1. A headless CMS: Decouple content and frontend to increase flexibility, scalability, and non-technical team autonomy, allowing marketers to build and localize pages independently, increasing speed-to-market and efficiency overall.
2. A modular, reusable component library: To drive consistency in content and UX and reduce operational costs from using multiple systems for content delivery across different channels and locales. 
3. Multi-locale, multi-site content delivery: Ponant needed to reach its international audiences seamlessly and deliver a digital experience that reflects the quality of its brands from a central content hub. 
4. AI readiness: Structured content and APIs that could be integrated with AI tooling for content generation, localization, and search optimization in the future. 
5. Improved editorial workflows: Minimal errors, speedy reviews, and an overall improved editorial experience with advanced workflows were a top priority. 

The procurement and evaluation process to find a CMS that checked all their boxes took about three months, during which the Ponant team tested editorial workflows, component modeling, localization, and ease of use with multiple providers, including Contentful, Prismic, Strapi, and several other e-commerce-oriented platforms — before finally selecting Storyblok as the CMS for the job. 

Why Ponant chose Storyblok  

From testing out a range of CMS solutions, here’s what made Storyblok stand out:

1. The headless architecture: Decouples content from the frontend, allowing developers to focus on features while editors manage content independently — perfect for speedy multi-site, multi-locale publishing.
2. The Visual Editor: Enables marketing teams to easily build, preview, and manage pages, drastically reducing reliance on developer support.
3. Component-based content model: Ponant's implementation features over 75 Storyblok components mapped to a three-layered React architecture: CMS blocks, business modules, and reusable UI primitives; totaling 60+ UI components and 20+ business modules. This modular approach ensures consistency across pages, locales, and channels, while accelerating content creation and localization from one place.
4. Strong multi-locale support: Ponant's setup supports multiple brands and markets from a single codebase with domain-based routing, each with its own theme and configuration. Combined with Storyblok's localization capabilities, this enables efficient content delivery across regions while maintaining brand consistency.
5. AI-powered by design: Ponant has already leveraged Storyblok's structured content and API-first architecture to build AI-powered features. 
6. Faster editorial workflows: Separation of content and the frontend, combined with structured components and visual editing, enables Ponant to launch campaigns and updates in hours rather than days or weeks.

The new architecture: Modern, composable content delivery 

With support from their external partner, Ponant migrated to Storyblok using a step-by-step, product-led rollout. The process began with building a robust component library and governance model to lay the right foundations, followed by hands-on editor workshops to onboard teams effectively.

Today, Ponant’s digital product managers, editors, marketing owners, external partners, and frontend tech team all actively collaborate in Storyblok in parallel, streamlining workflows and ensuring faster, coordinated delivery across the board.

Ponant also continued building out their flexible, modern tech stack to support their digital goals, fully integrated with Storyblok, featuring:

• Next.js/Tailwind CSS 4: Frontend framework
• Vercel: Hosting optimized for React frameworks 
• React 18: with React Server Component
• Magento: Open-source e-commerce platform 
• Bynder: Digital Asset Manager (DAM), seamlessly integrated via Storyblok's native Bynder plugin, enabling editors to browse, select, and transform assets directly within the Visual Editor without any custom development.
• Prediggo: Personalization and recommendation engine 
• MaPS: Product and cruise data platform
• ExpressJS: Dedicated service for automated data imports via Storyblok's Management API

The results: Smooth sailing with headless

After moving away from monolithic architecture and adopting Storyblok, Ponant saw significant improvements in content operations, speed, and team autonomy, enabling the brand to deliver a digital experience that matches the luxury of its expeditions. 

In particular, up to 7x faster content operations and delivery, as teams have the freedom to move faster and the tech to easily deliver across channels and the world. This has enabled marketing to manage 80% of all content independently and publish it across every region and channel from a centralized content hub — no developer intervention needed. Overall, they’ve transformed their digital agility, as teams across the business can iterate, create, and deploy quickly without compromising quality or consistency through modular, headless architecture — delivering the composable content system they set out to find.