Walk into any of the over 1,300 Michaels stores in the US or Canada, and you can’t help but be inspired. Since 1973, the arts and crafts specialty retailer has been sparking creativity for millions.

But behind Michaels’ operations, there’s creativity on the technology front as well. In recent years, Michaels has used Kong — starting with Kong Gateway and then moving to Kong Konnect — to revolutionize their API management and fortify their infrastructure. 

Uma Bhemisetty, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Michaels, sat down with Kong’s Chief Customer Officer, Sunil Wadhwa, at API Summit 2024 to discuss Michaels’ API transformation and valuable insights from a retail leader at the forefront of API excellence.

How API platforms are transforming retail

Between in-store experiences, point-of-sale technologies, and ever-changing website needs, the retail industry is in a constant state of transformation these days. In the face of this change, what is the value of a unified API platform?

“I think API platforms provide a lot of material business value,” Bhemisetty said. 

Bhemisetty would know — he’s the top technology leader at Michaels and is responsible for ensuring all technology initiatives and business objectives are aligned. 

A retail giant like Michaels has to wire many different systems together to carry out operations online and across its brick-and-mortar stores. Some of these are built internally, but others are acquired over the years and need to be integrated along the way. Bhemisetty pointed out API platforms not only manage but enhance and improve these collections of systems at scale.

The best part about using an API platform for Michaels? The developer productivity.

Bhemisetty and the developers at Michaels want to focus on building net new capabilities, improving time to market, and seeing more uptime and availability. 

But focusing on those important metrics becomes difficult when your team has to manage hundreds of API endpoints. Bhemisetty said that as business logic was implemented into their systems, there were also issues with rate limiting, scalability, SSL connectivity that had to be thought of at every endpoint. Part of the value of an API management platform is in unburdening developers from these repetitive concerns.

Another area of value? Insights. Bhemisetty said the insights from API platforms are a lot better — whether it’s overall analytics, seeing where latencies are, proactively monitoring unhealthy endpoints, and more. 

Suddenly, Bhemisetty said, a small set of smart engineers could monitor a large ecosystem of APIs for a retailer like Michaels.

And not just monitor — taking away API burden from the core development team improves time to market and helps develop APIs at a much lower cost.

The journey from open source to Kong Konnect

Kong Gateway is the world’s most adopted open source API gateway. It’s loved by developers and trusted by enterprises, including the team at Michaels. In recent years, Michaels adopted the unified API management platform Kong Konnect. What drove this decision?

Looking back on his team’s vision of creating their core digital platform, Bhemisetty recalls an attitude of “Let’s build everything; let’s use open source.” Creativity is at the core of what Michaels brings its customers, after all, and they knew they wanted a platform that could provide best-in-class customer experiences.

Then, as they started launching and learning, the feeling crept in: Are there any material business risks in the way we made some of these decisions?

Sure, Bhemisetty said, open source is capable of providing basic API functionality: load balancing, some amount of routing, and some customizations with plugins. 

But for advanced management features, things like a central control plane to deploy, the team at Michaels discovered they were better served with a commercial option.

Another deciding factor? Support. Open source solutions meant his team had to turn to open source community support for solutions.

With Kong Konnect, Bhemisetty said his team gets centralized policy management for consistent security across APIs and services and better capabilities on the service mesh integration. 

Everything came into focus under the lens of risk though. With open source alone, the team at Michaels had no one to call if there was a potential problem during Black Friday or Cyber Monday. With Kong Konnect, Bhemisetty's team knew they had the vast feature set and the right expertise — things they required going into peak holiday seasons. 

Bhemisetty called out the quality of support from the Kong team with Kong Konnect. The 2023 holidays were completely uneventful from a systems availability standpoint, resulting in a phenomenal holiday season for his team.

Putting Michaels on the forefront of API excellence

Creativity is in the DNA at Michaels, and the insights picked up by Bhemisetty and his team can inform the playbook of retailers everywhere who are having to go from API adoption to API excellence.

Here are some rapid-fire retail API insights from the rest of our discussion with Bhemisetty:

• On retail platforms: Today, a unified commerce platform is table stakes for what customers expect. Michaels made a unified commerce platform to power in-store, mobile, and desktop experiences, as well as custom interactions across every channel. Creating great experiences for customers requires hundreds of APIs to pull off, which is why the team at Michaels turned to an API management platform to manage their platform well.
• On peak seasonal API demand: A lot of preparation goes into the ops process to prepare for peak demand. Bhemisetty's team has built checklists over the years that get brought in months before peak holiday demand. His team knows what core business strategies have changed year over year and can incorporate that into what they prepare for this year’s peak seasons. With the insights from an API management platform, the team at Michaels can understand the API ecosystem in the moment, glean insights from analytics, and put priority on the APIs needed to scale. “It’s very important to prepare versus being sorry,” he said about retail during peak seasons.
• On what the future holds for APIs in retail: Customer expectations changed materially during the pandemic years, and AI is poised to allow more unique and targeted retail experiences for customers. Retailers need best-in-class systems to support what’s coming and how customer needs will change. AI and automation will enable companies to do a lot at scale, but retailers need the backend to support it. Bhemisetty's team looks forward to collaborating with Kong for the support needed.

Ready for API excellence in your organization? Learn more about unlocking the API-first operating model. Or get started with Kong Konnect for free.