In October 2025, we had the chance to attend HIVE in London, a one-day event co-created by Hyvä and Mollie. It brought together Magento and Hyvä-focused agencies, technology partners, and merchants for a mix of roadmap updates, real-life case studies, and an award showcase.
For Magebit, it was more than just another conference. We came with two strong Hyvä projects, Joma Jewellery / Katie Loxton and Dunkin’ UK, and left with a nomination and an eCommerce excellence award win. This is my recap of the day from Magebit’s point of view.
What Made HIVE Different From Other Magento Events
A showcase format, not just talks
HIVE did not feel like a typical conference with long keynotes and sales pitches. Instead, it was built around short, focused case study pitches. Agencies had a few minutes to present their best Hyvä projects, then the audience and judges voted.
I really liked three things about this format:
- You see real numbers and real problems, not generic theory
- You hear how other agencies actually work, including things that went wrong
- The day stays energetic, because every session is different and straight to the point
In my opinion, this is something many other Magento events are missing. HIVE was very practical and very honest. You could feel that everyone in the room actually builds Magento projects every day.
Strong community feeling
The room was full of eCommerce agencies from across Europe, especially the UK and the EU, plus some people who had travelled from further afield. It still felt small enough to be personal.
Between sessions, in the breaks, and later at the afterparty, it was very easy to connect with other agencies, compare approaches, and talk openly about challenges. It felt more like a community meetup than a stiff conference, which I really appreciated.
Our First Spotlight: Joma Jewellery and Katie Loxton
Who are Joma Jewellery & Katie Loxton?
Joma Jewellery and Katie Loxton are UK-based jewellery, gifting, and accessories brands founded by Katie and Geoff Loxton. Joma Jewellery launched in 2008, with Katie Loxton following in 2015 as a complementary lifestyle and accessories brand. Both are headquartered in the Banbury area in Oxfordshire and are known for affordable, personalised products built around gifting moments.
Scale, revenue, and team
Together, the brands operate as a mid-sized international retail group, selling through their own eCommerce sites, wholesale partners, and global stockists. Public company data places their combined revenue in the tens of millions of pounds per year, with Joma Jewellery reporting around £15.9M in 2023 revenue and Katie Loxton around £12.7M.
Across both brands, they employ roughly 80 people in the UK and internationally, covering eCommerce, wholesale, retail, and operations.
Daily eCommerce volume and customer profile
On a typical day, their online stores handle around 1,500 orders across both brands, with peaks around key gifting seasons, product drops, and promotions. Customers often buy multiple items per order, mix personal treats with gifts, and expect fast delivery, smooth personalization, and a frictionless checkout. That combination of high order volume, strong seasonality, personalized products, and international reach makes Joma Jewellery and Katie Loxton a great example of the kind of growing, experience-focused brands that benefit most from a high-performance Adobe Commerce + Hyvä setup.
The challenge: slow, outdated, and not converting as it should
Our first project on stage was Joma Jewellery and Katie Loxton, two fashion and accessories brands that share a lot of customers and expectations.
Before the rebuild, both brands had:
- Failing Core Web Vitals and performance scores as low as ~36 out of 100
- Heavy CSS and JavaScript, roughly 40 stylesheets per page in some views
- Layout shifts and slow rendering on key pages, like product detail
- A two-step checkout that created friction and did not build trust
- Weak accessibility and SEO signals
In simple words, traffic was growing, but the storefront was not helping conversions. The brands were investing in marketing, SEO, and growth, but the site experience limited the return.
Our solution: Hyvä + Venta theme as the foundation
We decided to rebuild both sites on Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) with Hyvä, using Magebit’s Venta theme as the base layer, and then fully customizing for each brand.
Key technical and UX improvements
- CSS and JS diet
Reduced stylesheets from around 40 per page to just 1–3 (massive 97.5% reduction in stylesheets!), removed a big amount of unused JavaScript, and used Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS to keep things lean. - Performance and media optimization
Introduced lazy loading, better caching strategy, and a custom image resizing setup using Cloudflare and a Venta image resizer, so even rich image content loads quickly. - New one-step checkout
Replaced the old two-step flow with Venta’s optimized one-step checkout, restyled to fit each brand, with:- Clear order summary
- Better address validation
- Clean, consistent design that builds trust
- Accessibility and UI consistency
Improved icon and font usage, contrast, and consistency across all sections, so the whole journey feels modern and coherent from homepage to checkout.
The results: strong lift in performance and revenue
After launch, the numbers started to move very quickly:
- Performance scores moved from the mid-30s to above 90
- Core Web Vitals shifted from failing to consistently passing
- +29% add to carts
- +14.2% total orders
- +46% returning customers
- +23% traffic
- +14.32% revenue
Conversion rate after the new cart and checkout increased by 15%, which is a big change for brands at this scale. These gains were very visible during Black Friday 2024, which became one of their strongest sales periods.
At Hive: nominated for Best Site Conversion Improvement
With this project, we were nominated in the “Best Site Conversion Improvement” category at HIVE. We did not win this category; the award went to another excellent project, but being shortlisted among the top case studies already says a lot.
For us, this nomination is a public validation that:
- Magebit can take a struggling Magento frontend,
- Move it to Hyvä with a smart foundation like Venta,
- And deliver real business results, not just better Lighthouse scores.
The Surprise Highlight: Dunkin’ UK Wins eCommerce Excellence
About Dunkin’ UK
Dunkin’ is a US-based, global coffee and baked goods brand with more than 14,000 locations worldwide, operating fully on a franchise model - all stores are franchisee-owned and operated.
In the UK, the brand doesn’t run as a direct outpost of the US corporate entity, but via local franchise partners who license the Dunkin’ brand and operate the stores and digital channels under that agreement.
One of those key partners is QFM Group, one of the largest franchise companies in the UK. The dunkin.co.uk site and UK eCommerce project sit within QFM’s portfolio as their way to differentiate in a competitive out-of-home food and beverage market using innovation and technology.
UK footprint and market position
Dunkin’ UK focuses on out-of-home coffee and donuts across England, with a growing network of a few dozen locations and expansion plans backed by franchise investment. Research on the brand notes Dunkin’ operating around 22+ sites in the UK as of 2025, all in England, with further growth planned in major urban areas.
For UK customers, this means you’re not dealing with a generic global site, but with a locally run franchise organisation that understands the UK market, product range, promotions, and delivery partners, while still benefiting from the strength and recognition of the international Dunkin’ brand.
From marketing site to serious eCommerce platform
The second project we submitted was Dunkin’ UK. Before we started, the UK site was on WordPress, more of a marketing and information site than a true eCommerce platform.
The main issues were:
- PageSpeed scores around 60, with long load times
- Core Web Vitals are regularly failing.
- Limited scalability for new features and integration work
- A lot of custom workarounds just to keep things running
Dunkin’ needed a site that could handle high volume online ordering, work with their booking and internal systems, and be fast enough to keep impatient users happy.
Our solution: Adobe Commerce + Hyvä for a fast, scalable build
We migrated Dunkin’ UK to Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) and used Hyvä for the frontend. The goal was clear: build a site that is fast, stable, and easy to grow.
What we changed under the hood
- Migrated data from WordPress to Magento with Hyva frontend
- Streamlined CSS and JavaScript delivery so the browser does less work
- Optimized rendering processes and eliminated unused scripts
- Implemented lazy loading and smarter caching for image-heavy pages
- Integrated the storefront with Dunkin’s booking system and compliance workflows
Every element on the site was reviewed with a simple question: Does this help the customer complete an order quickly and clearly?
The results: near instant experience and better business outcomes
After launch, the improvement was easy to see and easy to measure:
- PageSpeed scores jumped from around 60 to 95+ on both desktop and mobile
- Core Web Vitals started fully passing
- Largest Contentful Paint and interaction timings dropped to under a second
- Lighthouse reports improved across performance, SEO, and best practices
On the business side, this meant:
- Better organic visibility because Google rewards sites with strong Core Web Vitals
- Lower bounce rates and more users staying to complete orders
- Higher completion in checkout, fewer drop-offs due to slow steps
- A smoother overall experience that feels in line with Dunkin’s brand
At Hive: winning the eCommerce Excellence Award
During the awards part of the event, there was a twist. In addition to the regular categories, the judges announced a special eCommerce Excellence Award for a project that stood out.
This award went to Dunkin’ UK by Magebit. For us, this was huge for a few reasons:
- It was created by the judges, not just by audience vote
- It recognized not only speed improvements, but also the level of complexity and quality
- It put a global, well-known brand and our work for them into the spotlight
In simple terms, Joma Jewellery / Katie Loxton was our nomination, and Dunkin’ UK was our win.
Hyvä Roadmap: Why It Matters For Merchants And Agencies
Hyvä is becoming a full commerce suite
One of the most interesting parts of the day was the Hyvä roadmap session. It was clear that Hyvä is moving from “just a theme” to a broader Hyvä Commerce ecosystem.
Here are a few roadmap points that stood out to me.
Hyvä Admin: a modern, widget-based dashboard
Hyvä is working on a new Admin Dashboard for Magento, where:
- The dashboard is built from configurable widgets
- Different roles can have different layouts, for example, marketing sees sales and campaign widgets, support sees orders and customer issues
- The focus is on making daily work faster and clearer for non-technical users
For eCommerce managers, this means less time lost in the default Magento admin and a clearer view of what matters day to day.
Hyvä CMS: content editing that feels modern
The second big piece is Hyvä CMS, a new content system designed to replace the current experience.
Key ideas:
- Live preview while editing content
- Drag and drop editing of sections and blocks
- Version history and scheduling of changes
- A simpler way for marketing teams to build landing pages without developer help
For brands that run many campaigns, this is a big step forward. Content changes will be less of a bottleneck.
Media and performance tools built in
Hyvä is also investing in media optimization at the platform level, for example:
- Automatic responsive image generation
- Support for modern formats like WebP or AVIF
- Built-in tools to crop or slightly adjust images directly in the admin
All of this helps keep storefronts fast by default, not only when a developer remembers to optimize assets.
Hyvä Checkout and Enterprise improvements
Finally, Hyvä continues to improve Hyvä Checkout and Enterprise features:
- A more accessible, cleaner checkout layout
- Better handling of addresses and multiple address use cases
- Improved support for Adobe Commerce-specific B2B features
For Magento merchants, this means they can use Hyvä not only for B2C stores, but also for more complex B2B and Enterprise needs, without giving up the speed and developer friendliness that made Hyvä popular.
Find more information about Hyva Roadmap here: https://www.hyva.io/roadmap
How HIVE Felt From My Perspective
Well organized, useful, and actually fun
From start to finish, HIVE was very well organized. The venue, timing, and pacing all worked. There were no long, boring sessions; every talk delivered something concrete.
The presentations from other agencies were genuinely useful. I picked up ideas about:
- How do different teams structure Hyvä builds
- How others handle complex checkout logic or third-party integrations
How people measure success and talk about numbers with clients
This is exactly the type of “behind the scenes” sharing that I miss in many bigger events.
Networking that actually leads to ideas
The event gathered a very strong group of merchants, agencies, and partners. Conversations during breaks and in the evening were not just small talk. We compared tools, processes, and sometimes even “what we would do differently next time” stories.
For Magebit, it was also a chance to meet new people from the UK and wider Europe who had heard about our work but never met us in person. Showing up on stage, then winning an award for Dunkin’, helped create trust very quickly.
What This Means If You Work With Magebit
Recognized for results, not just for participation
Between the Joma Jewellery / Katie Loxton nomination and the Dunkin’ UK win, HIVE confirmed something important: Magebit is not just delivering “nice looking sites”, but measurable improvements in performance and conversion.
If you are an eCommerce manager or brand owner, that is what you actually care about. Faster sites, more orders, better ROI.
Deep Hyvä and Adobe Commerce experience
We are heavily invested in Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) and Hyvä:
- Multiple Hyvä builds live in production, including complex projects
- Our own Venta theme that accelerates Hyvä projects while keeping them flexible
- A global client base with brands like Dunkin’, Hydro Flask, Osprey, Henry Schein, and others
We combine this with a large certified team so we can support you not only with development, but also with SEO, UX, email marketing, and infrastructure.
Connected to the ecosystem
Because we actively join events like HIVE and collaborate with platform and tech partners, we stay very close to what is coming next in Magento and Hyvä.
For you as a client, this means:
- We know new features and best practices early
- We can choose the right tools and approaches for your project
- We have direct contacts with the teams behind Hyvä, Mollie, Adobe, and others when something needs escalation or deeper discussion
Closing Thoughts
HIVE was a great reminder of why I enjoy being part of the Magento and Hyvä ecosystem. It combined learning, honest sharing, and celebration in one day.
For Magebit, leaving with a nomination for Best Site Conversion Improvement for Joma Jewellery / Katie Loxton and a win for eCommerce Excellence with Dunkin’ UK is something I am very proud of.
If you are considering moving your Magento or Adobe Commerce store to Hyvä, or you are stuck with slow performance and poor conversion, this is exactly the type of work we love to do.
And who knows, maybe next time your project will be the one on stage at HIVE.
