Case study

HOW WE ENABLED A SELF-PUBLISHING PLATFORM WITH OVER 3 MILLION BOOKS

01 Story

Becoming a Pioneer in the Industry

Lulu began in 2002 after Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat, had a bad experience publishing with a vanity press. Since then, Lulu has been a pioneer and leader in the self-publishing and print-on-demand space, with over 2 million authors releasing over 3 million print and electronic books combined.

Mirumee and Lulu joined forces in 2018. Since then, we have awed millions of users with an easy-to-use platform, seamless e-commerce integrations (Shopify, WooCommerce), a book cover designer, and much more. Our close-knit partnership and a 100% custom platform leveraging composable commerce powered by GraphQL made this massive success possible.

lulu.com

brand since 2002,

technologies from 2018

I needed a team that is not only technically savvy, but also willing to engage with my challenges and is actively interested in solving them. I’ve found this in Mirumee. The level of engagement is just wonderful. They walk the extra mile, thinking ahead of what may happen if I introduce some features and help me shape the customer experience.

Christoph Kepper,

CTO, Lulu Press

02 Mission

Making The Dream Of Self-Publishing Possible

Lulu offers various services to authors, educators, artists, and nonprofits. It dedicates its efforts to making the world a better place, one book at a time, through sustainable practices.

Over 2 million authors enjoy the flexible and transparent printing experience away from the industry standard of imposing unfavorable contracts.

03 Challenges

Complex And Global Supply Chain

Reliable automation is essential, as multiple printing locations across every continent serve millions of users.

Gigantic Legacy Data

Older parts of the system had large amounts of inconsistent data that had to be treated, including over 1.5 million books.

Multiple Features Under the Lulu Umbrella

Lulu is more than custom book printing: a tight microservices architecture bonds development API, back office, checkout, and many more components.

Millions Of Users Demanding Smooth UX

Customers expect a streamlined experience to print a book. Pricing has to be clear and immediate, considering cover material, page type, shipping costs, and other factors.

05 Technology

06 Results

Print books
published:

2.6^mln

Ebooks
published:

1.1^mln

Monthly
pageviews:

34^mln

Number
of microservices:

40+

Increase in releases
per year:

3.650%

(from 12 to 450)

07 Communication

More Than Business Partners

The Mirumee team is deeply ingrained with Lulu. We participate in strategy and roadmap sessions to get a better sense of Lulu’s business goals. Together, we plan the feature roadmap to bring Lulu’s development strategies to market. This level of partnership allows Lulu to trust Mirumee with both short-term and long-term deliverables.

Effective Work With Remote Teams

The project includes teams in the USA, Germany, and Poland, meeting in person regularly. We set up effective communication across different time zones by utilizing several tools like Slack, Mattermost, and ClickUp and working in Agile methodology.

08 Strategy

On The Mission Toward Full Control

The Lulu platform is 100% bespoke and tailored to the company’s needs, allowing complete control over its features and user interface. Built on Python/Django, the platform is both scalable and reliable. In fact, the platform reliability has become so stable the Lulu team has ended "on call" rotations to handle outages.

Plentiful Options for Customers

We made it easy to sell books anywhere. Shopify and WooCommerce users can add a book printing module directly to their stores. Via Lulu, authors can also publish books on Amazon stores. And for any other website, developers can easily code custom modules through a free API connection.

Goal-Driven Modernization

To ensure a better user experience and a more scalable architecture, we modernized or rebuilt multiple components. For example, we migrated Angular and RestAPI to React and GraphQL on the Lulu Developer Portal and the internal back office tool. We also rebuilt the bookstore front-end app with Next.js, leveraging the server-side rendering and the newest tech on the market.

Preview Service

Users can review uploaded documents page-by-page before committing to the printing process. This Python service improves the experience of publishing books.

Cover Designer

Addressing a frequent user request, Mirumee delivered an easy-to-use online book cover designer. Authors can get creative or load templates using an intuitive interface similar to Canva.

We take pride in being more than just contractors - we are trusted business partners who can suggest improvements and contribute to Lulu’s goals and successes.”

Iga Dutczak,

PM, Mirumee

09 Future-proof

Seamless Expansion

Focusing on surpassing customers’ expectations is a bold move that paid off for Lulu. Lulu controls every nut and bolt of its platform instead of depending on external services. With that, authors receive the best user experience possible. And our partner can focus its energy on accomplishing its mission and goals.

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