How Artemest Scaled Its Platform for Global Growth and B2B Sales — While Preserving a Luxury Experience

When Manual Workflows and Legacy Tech Limit Growth

At the heart of Artemest’s growth strategy was a desire to bring Italian craftsmanship to a global audience - through a luxury e-commerce experience that felt both exclusive and effortless. But scaling a high-touch luxury platform is rarely straightforward.

Artemest’s team needed better tools, faster operations, and a backend that could keep up with their creative vision. On top of that, in the world of luxury, every detail matters. Artemest knew that delivering a premium experience at scale would require more than surface-level fixes, but a long-term partner to help stabilize its foundation and build for the future.

• Outdated infrastructure: Legacy architecture created instability, small changes often led to unintended system-wide issues.
• Lack of Internationalization Infrastructure: The platform was limited to English, with no scalable way to support multi-language catalogs or localized user experiences.
• Manual B2B Sales Workflows: Sales to trade clients (e.g. designers, architects) relied on ad-hoc processes that didn’t scale or integrate with their commerce engine.
• Growing Product Catalog Complexity: Managing and updating a catalog of 80,000+ high-end products was becoming unsustainable without structured automation.
• Fragmented systems: The checkout experience lacked regional payment options, which hindered conversion in key markets
• Pressure to Grow While Maintaining Brand Quality: Artemest needed to scale operations without compromising their luxury feel and brand consistency.

Where UX, Infrastructure, and Scalability Meet

In 2022, initially brought in to support internationalization on their self-hosted Spree Commerce platform, Upside became Artemest’s long-term technical partner, helping the company to evolve across every layer of their commerce operation. When in 2024 Artemest made a decision to move to Shopify to further enhance their growth, Upside remained an on-call technology partner.

1.Beyond Translation: Scalable Localization Built for Accuracy and SEO

One of Artemest’s biggest growth levers was international market entry, so the platform needed infrastructure for managing multi-language content while adapting the user experience by region. Upside built a complete translation workflow that included AI-assisted pipelines, manual validation tooling, and catalog management processes tailored to the nuances of luxury home and design products.

Unlike many off-the-shelf solutions that misinterpret industry-specific terminology, Upside’s system preserved the accuracy of complex product descriptions, ensuring that terms like “Murano glass” or “patina finish” weren’t lost in translation. The platform translated over 60,000 product entries in just days, orchestrating costs and staging to handle AI usage at scale. Translated catalogs were automatically structured and linked across languages, preserving SEO, and delivering a polished experience to both customers and internal teams.

This balance between speed, accuracy, and operational integrity reflects Upside’s approach: address immediate needs while aligning with long-term goals, so that every solution is not just functional, but future-ready.

2. Backend Overhaul: Ensuring Scalability, Security, and Maintainability

Artemest’s backend needed to evolve to support future growth, handle increasing complexity, and remain resilient under demand. Upside began by assessing the system’s foundations, identifying weak points that could compromise performance or stability at scale.

The team modernized core frameworks, resolved security vulnerabilities, redesigned key APIs, and introduced architectural safeguards to prevent cascading failures. Instead of quick fixes, Upside took a systems-level approach, ensuring the backend was structured in a way that would remain stable and maintainable as new features and complexity were added over time.

To support this, Upside also introduced a rigorous QA process, including optimizing test coverage tracking, manual validation, and a reliable weekly release cadence. This brought consistency to deployments and restored confidence across Artemest’s technical and product teams.

3. Enabling B2B Sales: Supporting Complex Orders and Multi-Stage Payments

As Artemest expanded its B2B Trade Program for interior designers and architecture firms, it became clear that their commerce platform needed the tools to support complex, relationship-driven sales. Sales reps needed more than a standard checkout, but also a system to build and revise orders over time, coordinate with clients and finance teams, and handle payments in multiple stages.

To meet this need, Upside developed a custom order-building workflow within the back office. Reps could assemble carts, make ongoing adjustments, and generate secure, payment-ready links to share with different stakeholders. These links supported deposits, split payments, and role-specific access, which helped streamlining the entire sales cycle.

This shift allowed Artemest to evolve from a consumer-only storefront into a hybrid B2B model, better aligned with the way trade professionals actually buy, a key step in their move from startup to scale-up.

4. Localized Payments: Powering a Seamless Checkout for Global Buyers

Offering region-specific payment methods was essential for serving Artemest’s international buyers, and it needed to be implemented without adding complexity to the user experience. Upside helped integrate Stripe Checkout along with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and localized gateways tailored to Artemest’s key markets.

But the work went beyond implementation. Upside evaluated each payment provider for security, cost-efficiency, and fit with Artemest’s financial structure, which included multiple legal entities across regions. The team designed custom logic to route transactions correctly and ensure compliance with local regulations and accounting standards.

Because checkout is one of the most sensitive moments in a luxury shopping experience, performance was critical. Upside collaborated closely with Artemest’s frontend team to optimize API calls and caching, delivering a fast, elegant experience that matched the brand’s high-end feel.

From Vendor to Partner: What Makes a Technical Partnership Last

What began as a narrowly scoped internationalization project evolved into a deep, multi-year collaboration. Over time, Upside became Artemest’s go-to partner, not just for backend development, but for infrastructure planning, cross-system integration, and long-term technical strategy.

At the core of Upside’s approach are three principles that consistently drive value for clients:

• Transparency and collaboration
• Feature excellence and future ready
• Security and infrastructure integrity

With Artemest, this meant working side by side with product managers, QA teams, and engineers. Planning was shared, timelines were co-owned, and Upside played a central role in shaping features, estimating efforts, and validating technical decisions.

Beyond feature delivery, Upside also supported cross-system integration—syncing data with platforms like Salesforce, building frontend-ready APIs, and designing stable language-switching logic for multilingual experiences.

Today, Artemest runs on a more resilient and future-proof platform, one capable of supporting global operations while preserving the boutique feel that defines the brand.

Turning Complexity into Clarity: The Upside Way

In a world flooded with hype, most companies don’t need yet another tool, but need a thoughtful partner who can help them turn fragmented systems and messy data into something that actually works. That’s where we come in.

We engineer clarity from complexity, securely, collaboratively, at speed, and with UX that people genuinely enjoy using. Our work is deeply technical, but always strategic. Collaborative, but never rigid. Grounded, yet open to experimentation. Several qualities set us apart:

• Deep Commerce Expertise: With over 8 years in e-commerce, we bring a tested playbook for solving growth-stage challenges—localization, trade workflows, systems integration, and payment optimization.
• Strategic Engineering: We don’t just ship features. We build with foresight, ensuring today’s architecture won’t become tomorrow’s bottleneck.
• Full-System Thinking: Features don’t exist in silos. We consider every decision through the lens of long-term stability, business alignment, and user experience.
• Embedded Collaboration: We don’t show up as outsiders. We work as part of your team, sharing ownership of outcomes and moving in sync.