Chemist Warehouse finds the right prescription to scale content with Contentful

Every week, more than 3 million Australians rely on Chemist Warehouse’s online site and 500+ retail locations for everything from prescription medications and everyday essentials to trusted health advice. Meeting those expectations means product information, health content, and promotions must be updated quickly and accurately as inventory shifts, promotions launch, and medical guidance evolves. But Chemist Warehouse's technical infrastructure wasn't built to keep up.

Until 2025, Chemist Warehouse managed its multi-brand online presence on a customized legacy platform that had become difficult to maintain. This included the Chemist Warehouse website and other brands under the Sigma Chemist Warehouse umbrella, such as Ultra Beauty, its luxury personal care brand, and RSVP, its immunization and vaccination service. 

Development cycles stretched into weeks, and every content update required hard-coding. As a result, publishing new product catalogs and and Help Center content was slow and often led to inconsistencies across the company's digital experiences. This resulted in cart abandonment and lower engagement rates.

“The system eventually got to the point where if we tried to push it further, things broke,” said Paul Värk, Senior Manager, Digital Experience, at Chemist Warehouse. “Our website started to crash when too many people came to it. Black Friday was a huge eye-opener for us.” 

Realizing it was time for a technical intervention, Chemist Warehouse reached out to Australian Digital Marketing Agency, Covert, for support in selecting a new platform, which led them to Contentful. Today, the retailer is launching campaigns faster, delivering more consistent experiences across its brands, and building the foundation for personalized content both online and in-store.

Prescribing a better platform 

As Chemist Warehouse explored alternative CMSes, they kept one thing top of mind: the next solution needed to prioritize the internal user experience as much as it did the end user experience. For an organization serving millions of customers every week, the challenge wasn't just publishing content faster. It was building a digital operating model capable of supporting rapid merchandising, multiple brands, seasonal demand, and future digital experiences without increasing operational complexity.

They wanted marketers to be able to manage content independently and developers to spend less time making routine updates. They also wanted the new platform to act as a central hub for content and design, supporting reuse across brand-specific domains for a more consistent, scalable brand experience. They decided a headless solution, which decouples content and data from front-end presentation, would be ideal because it allowed content to be created once, managed centrally, and delivered consistently across every brand touchpoint without requiring duplicate work.

Chemist Warehouse and Covert took an active approach as they evaluated headless options, participating in demos and getting to know each vendor in depth. 

"The technology specifications were important, but so were the people who would be supporting us through the implementation, and that’s what made us pick Contentful, ” shared Vark. “They really took time to understand how we were operating at that moment, what our challenges were, and where we wanted to go.” 

After making the final decision to replatform, Chemist Warehouse began an engagement with Contentful Professional Services to provide guidance on content modeling, integrations, and governance. 

Formulating content models for scalability and consistency

The first priority for Chemist Warehouse was establishing its content model. Vark and his team audited their existing content library to sketch out which content types and modules would be needed to support their brand, and then they started building. In just three weeks, their work on the models was complete, giving them confidence in the new platform. 

With the content architecture in place, attention turned to the broader implementation. Bringing the company's existing content into that model and integrating their core operational tools — including Netlify for hosting and commercetools for managing retail transactions (both available in the Contentful Marketplace) set Chemist Warehouse up to support the next decade of digital growth.

Finding the cure to content management inefficiencies

Switching to Contentful has fundamentally changed how both marketing and development teams work. Developers spend less time implementing routine content requests and more time building strategic capabilities that improve the customer experience. Marketing teams no longer need to coordinate around engineering schedules, giving them the flexibility to launch campaigns when the business demands, not when the next release window opens. Those operational efficiencies continue to compound. 

Before Contentful, marketing teams relied on developers for even relatively small website updates. Content changes waited in development queues and release schedules, turning simple campaign launches into multi-week projects. 

Today, marketers manage these updates themselves, from biweekly homepage refreshes to launching new landing pages for bespoke campaigns. Ideas can move from planning to production in hours instead of weeks, allowing Chemist Warehouse to respond to market changes and new business priorities almost immediately. 

One tangible example of success? Chemist Warehouse’s Christmas hub was built in a single day.

Increasing brand resilience with better resourcing and design systems

While greater speed to market has been a welcome change for Chemist Warehouse, the developer resources saved in the process have made Contentful a real winner across the organization.

“The cost for a two-week dev cycle could be several hundred grand. Today, the cost is far less. We’re more collaborative and efficient,” said Värk. 

Contentful’s Forma 36 design system is playing a role here as well, providing a standardized library of 80+ reusable UI components, design patterns, and accessibility guidelines that ensure experiences look and behave consistently across Chemist Warehouse’s entire digital ecosystem.

The result is a more cohesive customer experience and content operations that are significantly easier to govern as the business continues to grow.

What's next with Contentful

Chemist Warehouse's ambitions for Contentful extend well beyond its website. The team is exploring how the same structured content can power digital screens throughout its retail stores, allowing campaigns to move seamlessly between online and physical locations while maintaining a consistent customer experience.

They're also laying the groundwork for more personalized experiences, delivering more relevant messaging for every audience across channels.

For Chemist Warehouse, Contentful isn't just supporting today's website. It's becoming the content foundation for every customer interaction, from ecommerce to in-store experiences.