Mars-owned luxury chocolate — preservative-free D2C experience
Ethel M Chocolates is a Mars, Incorporated subsidiary — the premium boxed-chocolate brand founded by Forrest Mars Sr. (creator of M&M's and the Mars bar) and named after his mother. The Henderson, Nevada factory produces preservative-free, small-batch chocolates sold through flagship retail, wholesale, and ethelm.com national e-commerce.
I enhanced the luxury D2C experience on commercetools + Next.js, aligning digital craft with Mars family brand standards.
Integrations
| Source | Stack |
|---|---|
| Public (ethelm.com scan) | GTM, Datadog, OneTrust |
| Engineering | commercetools, Algolia, Stripe, AI recommendations, multi-tenant patterns |
What I delivered
- Next.js SSR/SSG for gift-oriented PDPs, seasonal collections, and Nevada factory storytelling
- commercetools catalog, cart, and multi-payment checkout including Stripe
- Algolia search and merchandising for premium SKU discovery
- AI-driven recommendation engines for gift bundles and cross-sell
- Multi-tenant architecture patterns supporting Mars digital platform conventions
- Datadog monitoring on checkout and campaign traffic
- Performance tuning for image-heavy chocolate PDPs — luxury UX without sacrificing Core Web Vitals
Mars ecosystem context
- Subsidiary of Mars, Incorporated — shared policies on nutrition labeling, privacy, and quality
- Test kitchen innovates new candies for the broader Mars portfolio
- D2C growth strategy: Amazon, mass retail, and owned e-commerce (ConfectioneryNews)
Technologies used
Next.js, commercetools, Algolia, Stripe, TypeScript, AI recommendations, Datadog, multi-tenant commerce
Result
A seamless luxury chocolate e-commerce experience worthy of the Mars heritage — fast, personalized, and positioned for national D2C scale.
