About Annemarie Börlind
“What I can’t eat, I won’t put on my skin.” With this commitment to quality, Annemarie Lindner was a pioneer of natural cosmetics. In 1959, she founded Börlind GmbH in Calw in the Black Forest together with her husband Walter Lindner and Hermann Börner. The company name is a combination of the founders’ surnames, Börner and Lindner.
The first brand, Annemarie Börlind Natural Skin Care, was later joined by Dado Sens in 1987, a line developed specifically for sensitive skin. When it came to the purity of raw materials, the founder made no compromises. For example, the water used in the cosmetics comes from two of the company’s own deep springs.
The company also develops groundbreaking ingredients, such as an extract from stem cells of the Black Forest rose. Börlind remains family-owned to this day, with the third generation taking over in 2020.
The Challenge
Natural skincare products from Annemarie Börlind are in high demand. The new online shop in the AWS Cloud has played a key role in that success. PCG assisted with optimization and has taken over monitoring.
Double-digit growth rates are something many companies can only dream of — for Annemarie Börlind, they’re standard in e-commerce. The natural cosmetics pioneer from the Black Forest continues to win over more and more customers with its skincare products. The online shop has also benefited: 25 percent of the company’s €60 million in revenue now comes from online sales. In eight years, that figure is expected to reach 50 percent — even though Börlind only entered e-commerce five years ago.
To keep up with this online growth, the shop urgently needed an overhaul. The combination of Magento and a European cloud hosting provider could no longer meet the increasing performance demands, and the administrative workload became overwhelming for the Börlind team.
The Solution
Faster Performance, Fewer Errors
Since early 2024, Annemarie Börlind’s online shop has been running smoothly and efficiently. Customers benefit from fast load times and a convenient shopping experience. Meanwhile, the Börlind team no longer has to deal with constant errors and can finally focus on their real priorities: optimizing the shopping experience and launching special promotions.
The difference? The shop now runs on Shopware in the AWS Cloud — scalable, flexible, and highly available. This transformation wasn’t something the Börlind team could have managed on their own, as IT Manager Tobias Stahl explains. They needed a partner to support them through this demanding process. They chose an IT consultancy to develop a migration strategy and build the shop on AWS. However, the initial setup left much to be desired, and performance issues persisted. Additionally, the partner lacked the AWS expertise needed to take on operational responsibility — something the Börlind team was specifically looking for to ease the day-to-day workload.
That’s where PCG came in. Tobias Stahl discovered the cloud experts from Magstadt through a simple Google search in the Stuttgart area. “PCG is a Swabian mid-sized company, just like us — the chemistry was right from the beginning.”
Record-Speed Migration
PCG completed the project in just eight weeks — from signing the contract to final delivery. During this time, they took full operational responsibility for the AWS environment, handling everything from backups and patching to monitoring via Datadog. Together with the initial partner, PCG also significantly improved the performance of the Shopware installation.
Several PCG business units were involved in the project. “No matter who we spoke to at PCG, they were always competent — and every experience was positive.”
One highlight was the involvement of PCG’s Dev Unit, which integrated the Amazon Seller API. This eliminated the need for the previously time-consuming manual connection between the ERP system and Amazon. The same was done for other online marketplaces such as Douglas and Alibaba — the latter being increasingly important for the growing Chinese market.
The payoff: monitoring alerts have dropped significantly. If an alert does occur, PCG intercepts it and handles it according to a predefined escalation plan — which specifies who should be contacted, when, and through which Teams channel. For Tobias Stahl, success comes down to more than just the right technology — it takes the right people. And with PCG, he’s found them. “The collaboration is outstanding.”
Results and Benefits
Customer Service with AI
After one project comes the next. More initiatives — again with PCG's support — are already in the pipeline, reveals IT Manager Tobias Stahl. While Börlind isn’t pursuing a cloud-only strategy, it’s clear that more functions will be shifted to the AWS Cloud in the future, especially newly developed ones. Leading the way: artificial intelligence.
The company is already using an internal chatbot that analyzes large volumes of data, generates FAQs, and retrieves tracking information from the logistics system. For external use, aimed at improving customer relationships, the team has also built an AI-based prototype. This tool generates appropriate responses to customer email inquiries, referencing relevant FAQ entries. The relief this brings to the customer support team is clearly noticeable.
When it comes to AI solutions, Stahl’s team also relies on PCG. “Our goal with strategic projects like this is to build the expertise within our own team,” he says. For PCG, that’s a given. They work in a spirit of partnership and equality, avoiding the kind of “secret knowledge” dependencies that some other consultancies create.
Through a dedicated training series on AWS and Datadog, PCG experts regularly share new developments and best practices from the AWS ecosystem. These sessions currently take place every two weeks and are set to be expanded with additional Data & AI workshops.
A Relaxed Start to the Holiday Season
The new shop has already passed its first big test. Black Friday in November 2024 and the holiday shopping season went off without a hitch. There were no performance issues, and the customer shopping experience has noticeably improved, says Tobias Stahl. And the best part? “My team members are heading into the Christmas holidays much more relaxed.”
About PCG
Public Cloud Group (PCG) supports companies in their digital transformation through the use of public cloud solutions.
With a product portfolio designed to accompany organisations of all sizes in their cloud journey and competence that is a synonym for highly qualified staff that clients and partners like to work with, PCG is positioned as a reliable and trustworthy partner for the hyperscalers, relevant and with repeatedly validated competence and credibility.
We have the highest partnership status with the three relevant hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft. As experienced providers, we advise our customers independently with cloud implementation, application development, and managed services.