Meet Magento Netherlands 2026: Mollie Told Our Vitacom Story on Stage, and I Slept Through It

On 5 November 2026 I was at Meet Magento Netherlands for the third year in a row, at LIEF Amsterdam. In 2024, this is where LIQUIDLAB began. In 2025 we signed Hyvä's fifth-birthday wall. This year, at an edition of about 400 attendees, Mollie told the Vitacom story from the main stage, in the first slot of the day.

I slept through the welcome keynote. I heard about it from other people.

Five alarms

The evening before, on 4 November, was the pre-party at Westergas. It was a good evening. Good enough that the next morning I slept through five alarms, one after the other.

I got to LIEF around 11:00, after a waffle eaten on the move at Sloterdijk, on the way to the venue. The day had started long before. The welcome keynote, the 9:15 slot reserved for the headline sponsors Hyvä and Mollie, was over too.

What I missed at 9:15

Willem Wigman, from Hyvä, talked about lowering the entry barrier to Magento.

Then it was Mollie's turn. The slides would not load. Ksenia Zvereva, from Mollie, did not wait: she started without them and told, from memory, the story she had picked as her example of Magento made easier.

She talked about a store so slow that its website told shoppers to call if they could not place an order. She called that note a "conversion killer". Then she told how the room at HIVE voted the case Best Performance Improvement, and finished with "This is impressive."

When the slide finally loaded, the screen showed the photo from HIVE Mainz: Ksenia, Willem and me, under the title "Magento, made easier". Ksenia said she was not sure if I was in the room, "but that was actually LIQUIDLAB and their story".

I was not in the room. I was still in bed, somewhere between alarms.

The talk ended on a slide with Mollie's message: "Thanks for building with us." The thanks go both ways.

How I found out

Not from a notification. Once I got to LIEF, people started to recognise me. One after another they came over to tell us that Mollie had talked about us on stage. That is how we found out.

In the photo, with me: Davide Lunardon, Gianluca Porta, Luca Alessio Fuser and Samuele Martini from the Italian Magento community, and Laurentius Judhianto from storeframe.io.

I watched the recording of the talk later the same day. It is a strange feeling to see yourself on the big screen of an event you were still asleep for. It is also a very good one: we were not sponsors, we were not on the agenda, and the story was told from memory, by someone else, as an example for the whole room.

The story behind the slide

Vitacom is a Romanian electronics retailer, in business since 1991, with three storefronts on a single Magento installation: a public store, a B2B store and an export store. When we took the project over, in January 2026, the store was already on Magento 2 and Hyvä. Even so, it was slow, and the note Ksenia talked about was right there on the site.

We worked in three phases, each one launched on its own: security first, in February, then simplifying, in March, and only then speed, on 19 May, with Liquid Framework and Hyvä Checkout. The results:

• Server response: from 15,814 ms to 12 ms. The first figure is the homepage, the second a product page answered from the cache, so read them as the size of the change.
• 8x less hardware: from 64 cores to 16, then to 8.
• Best Performance Improvement at HIVE Germany 2026, voted by the room in Mainz, on 21 October.

Same Magento, same Hyvä. The full story is in the Vitacom case study, and the award night is in our post on the HIVE Germany 2026 win.

The rest of the day

Once there, I caught up as much as I could.

At the qoliber stand I found the LIQUIDLAB logo on their banner. Thank you for having our logo on your stand.

I also caught qoliber's talk: "Developers, Stop Doing Marketing."

At the Hyvä × Mollie stand I queued for the caricaturist and left with a caricature. At least I made that one on time.

Hyvä summed up the day in a LinkedIn post, and a few things in it matter to any merchant on Magento:

• More than 8,200 live Hyvä stores, after six years.
• Hyvä POS, Hyvä's app for selling in a physical store, is free on the App Store. It already installs from the Romanian App Store too, although Hyvä has not opened selling in Romania yet.
• "The 14-Day Shift": a keynote about five Shopify stores prepared to move to Magento Open Source and Hyvä, ready to launch on 14 days' notice. Before launch, 195 of their 202 category pages scored 90+ on mobile.
• A keynote on research with 8,000 European consumers, about what they expect from delivery and from checkout.

The evening ended at the afterparty. That one I made on time.

Three years at LIEF

Read in order, the three posts tell one story. 2024 was the day LIQUIDLAB began. In 2025 we left a message on Hyvä's wall, on the day Hyvä announced the theme would become free. In 2026, one of the event's headline sponsors told, from memory, the story of a Romanian store our team rebuilt.

In between came Meet Magento Germany 2026, the day after the win.

Meet Magento NL 2027 is on 4 November 2027. It is already in the calendar. With six alarms.

Thank you

Thank you to the Mage-OS Nederland team for another full day at LIEF. Thank you to Ksenia and the Mollie team for a story told without slides, from memory, and to Willem and the Hyvä team for the stage they build year after year. Thank you to the Vitacom team for trusting us with the store their business depends on. And thank you to qoliber for the logo on the stand.

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