A Room Full of Friends and an Award: HIVE Germany 2026

For a second, I didn’t understand what I had just heard.

I was sitting in the audience at the Pyramide in Mainz on October 21, 2026, when the winner of “Most Innovative Website or Solution” was announced, and the name was ours: CustomGento, for our relaunch of KREANDO AG on Hyvä Commerce. My brain blanked for a moment. Then it caught up, and I was just so, so happy and proud.

What Is HIVE?

HIVE is an e-commerce award show and Hyvä partner day in one, hosted by Hyvä and Mollie. After its first edition in London in 2025, it came to Germany this year, the afternoon before Meet Magento Germany and at the same venue. The conference is finally back after a six-year break. One of its organizers is our very own Simon Sprankel, so it was an exciting week for CustomGento.

The idea: agencies submit their Hyvä projects in one of four categories: Best Performance Improvement, Quickest Time to Market, Best Site Conversion Improvement, and Most Innovative Website or Solution. A jury of people from Hyvä and Mollie, last year’s HIVE winners and other members of the Magento community picks the finalists.
Each finalist then gets five minutes on stage to pitch their project, and the audience votes for the winners live.

First, the News

Our host Sanne guided us through the whole afternoon and kept it fun and full of energy. It all kicked off with a short welcome from Willem of Hyvä and Anton of Mollie. Ksenia from Mollie followed with a look at what’s coming next, for example Pay by Bank and a direct connection to AI tools like Claude or Codex.

Thien-Lan from Hyvä had a number to celebrate: Hyvä is now the 11th most used e-commerce platform among the top one million websites worldwide.
Then her colleague John walked us through the new products from the big Equinox release. Hyvä now ships its major releases twice a year, at the solstice and the equinox. In between, there are only smaller updates like bug fixes and security patches, plus betas. As an agency, we really like that: it makes updates much easier to plan for our clients. John even gave us a peek at what’s next, like the SEO Suite, the PDF Builder and a blog for Hyvä CMS.

Then it was time for the pitches, one category after the other. After each category, everyone in the room voted in an app: scan the QR code, pick a project, submit.

A Whole Team Behind One Pitch

When it was our turn, I was the one holding the microphone, but this project was never a one-person show. Our frontend team did most of the work, and everyone else at CustomGento pitched in at some point during the relaunch. Add a designer who shaped the look and feel and a client team who knew their customers better than anyone, and you get the team this award really belongs to. I got five minutes on stage for many months of work by many people. It was an honor to tell that story on behalf of all of us.

“Please Touch Your Sleeve”

I had never given a talk on a stage like this before: real faces, five minutes, and an audience that voted live. I had butterflies in my stomach, and on top of that, I was still getting over a cold and was afraid my voice would give out halfway through.

My pitch didn’t start with my slides, but with a request: I asked everyone in the room to touch the sleeve of whatever they were wearing.

You could see the reaction: okaaay, I’ll do it… but why?
Then I said: “Congratulations, you now know more about the material of your clothes than a regular product image can tell you.”

Something clicked in the room right then. KREANDO sells fabrics, yarn and sewing supplies. Many of them are products people want to feel before they buy. So the question for the relaunch was: how do you get as close as possible to that feeling in an online shop? That’s what the rest of my five minutes were about.

Fabric You Can (Almost) Touch

We built the new shop around large images, because they’re the closest you can get to touching a fabric online. Hyvä Media Optimization makes sure they don’t slow the shop down.

Every color of a fabric is its own product, and in the old shop, you only saw a small swatch of the others. Now customers can browse through several images of each product right on the category page. On the product page, the gallery also previews the other colors, so a fabric and its colors feel like one family.

To make the huge catalog easier to browse, the new menu groups the categories by project, like blouses or coats, and even by how a fabric feels, from airy to sturdy. That way, customers find the right category even if they don’t know the name of the fabric.

And on the product page, customers can add a fitting product to the cart in the same step: the matching thread for a fabric, for example, or a free sewing pattern to go with it.

After the pitch, people came up to me and said they could really relate to the problem. That was exactly what I had hoped for.

In the end, everything held up: my voice despite the cold, and my nerves despite the butterflies.

Not a Competition, Really

The other finalists for “Most Innovative Website or Solution” were Magebit and Blackbird Agency, both with really impressive projects. Technically, they and all the other agencies in the room are our competitors, but it never feels like that at Magento events. Everyone is warm, welcoming, and genuinely happy for each other. It feels like a reunion with friends you don’t see often enough, or like meeting old classmates and catching up on what everyone has been building.

After the last pitch, all the winners were announced and received their awards: LIQUIDLAB, e3n and PHPro won the other three categories. An additional Excellence Award, outside the categories, went to integer_net for their work with Hyvä Commerce.

Afterwards, there was dinner and a relaxed get-together, with more photos and interviews. I caught up with so many familiar faces and met new ones too: people from Hyvä, Mollie, RUMvision and agencies all over Europe, from the UK to Romania. Some of the Hyvä team told me how much they liked what we did with their tools. Coming from the people who built them, that meant a lot.

Many people moved on to the Meet Magento pre-party that evening, but I headed back to the hotel to save my voice and my energy for the conference the next day. At the conference, I met the rest of our team, as all of CustomGento was there.

What We’re Taking Home

When you put your heart and a lot of work into a project, it’s an amazing feeling when others see it, like it, and find it impressive. This award belongs to everyone who made this relaunch happen:

• My colleagues at CustomGento, who put so much love into every detail of this shop. I’m so proud of all of us.
• The KREANDO team, who trusted us with their shop, gave us honest feedback all the way, and were just as happy and proud as we were when they heard the news.
• Mathieu Handouche, whose design does justice to the products. Working with him is always a real pleasure.

A big thank you to Mollie and Hyvä for hosting HIVE, and especially to Merel and Isabella for organizing such a fantastic afternoon and evening.
And to everyone in the room who voted: thank you!

Are you planning a Hyvä project of your own? Find out how we can help on our Hyvä development page.