Faster. Smarter. Scalable. How toujou Turns Enterprise TYPO3 Websites into a Repeatable Pattern

Back in May, we were joined by a few of our partner agencies at the first TYPO3 North America Summit in Atlanta, Georgia. Alongside the keynotes, we reserved dedicated slots for our partners to showcase their products and real-world work built on TYPO3.

One of those slots went to Viviane Gebelein, Head of Service at toujou, a TYPO3 website builder developed by a team in Franconia, Germany, with 26 years of web experience. Viviane’s talk addressed a problem every agency faces; delivering an enterprise website isn't the hard part rather delivering them in a way that scales and stays profitable is.

Viviane began her talk by giving a brief introduction of her background, the agency and the origin of the name toujou. She explained that in Japanese, toujou (登場) means entering a stage. She framed the idea simply: toujou is the stage, the agency is the show, and the result is an unlimited number of websites built with TYPO3.

The roles are clearly split. Agencies focus on service, design, and content. Hosters deliver the infrastructure. And toujou provides the system in between, so the agency doesn't have to.

To prove that a website builder isn't just for small sites and can handle enterprise level projects, Viviane presented Rotkäppchen-Mumm, Germany's leading producer of sparkling wine, wine, and spirits. The group runs many brands under one corporate umbrella, but their websites were built on different systems, by different agencies, with different designs. In order to retain their market position of 1.28 billion dollars in revenue (in 2024), they partnered with toujou as their website builder. 

Read the full Rotkäppchen-Mumm case study here

Within two and a half years, more than 40 brand websites launched on toujou—an average project duration of three months. Each brand kept its own design and its own agencies (more than 30 of them to be exact) while sharing centrally managed functions such as the Mautic marketing integration. Age verification, and consent management were also implemented as mandatory features. 

The reusable architecture also makes relaunches fast and reliable. An impressive takeaway to support that claim? Viviane shared that the relaunch of the PFEFFI brand site took exactly 16 hours. Not days, not weeks, not months.

And it's not a one-time success story, it’s a repeatable pattern. toujou has applied the same approach across more than 1,000 installations. 

“It’s a shift away from thinking in individual projects, rather to thinking in platforms.”

-Viviane Gebelein

Viviane defined the four challenges most agencies share:

1. Starting projects from scratch
2. Building one-off "unicorn" features
3. Design bottlenecks
4. Maintenance pain

A sentiment that landed with the room reminded us that most people got into this business because they want to build something, not because they want to manage complexity. 

In combination with TYPO3, working with a kickstarter, alleviates the “starting from scratch” conundrum. We saw this in our latest TYPO3 v14 LTS release with the out-of-the-box default theme, Camino. A place to get started.

What does a kick-starter look like? Viviane’s presentation showed that it can look like a ready-to-use system with over 150 content elements, from headers and teasers to sliders and multi-step forms, that even non-technical editors can handle versus starting from a blank slate.

Rather than unicorn features, Viviane and her team sought to translate real business needs into reusable features such as TYPO3's multilingual and multi-site capabilities, reusable modules for events and careers, and integrations such as Mautic and Solr search, all included in a fixed pricing model.

Design sits somewhere between total freedom and rigid templates. What does this mean for agencies? They can use a theme as-is, adjust it, or implement a pixel-perfect design, with the website builder delivering around 80% of the base doing a majority of the heavy lifting.

Viviane closed her session with a question for every agency in the room: “what could you achieve if technology stopped being the bottleneck and started being the accelerator?”

We're excited to announce that the TYPO3 North America Summit returns to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta on May 19, 2027. Whether you're already building with TYPO3 or just curious about what it can do, we'd love for you to join us and meet the growing North American TYPO3 community.

Stay tuned for more updates.