I recently attended the Hyvä Townhall webinar where the ever-expanding Hyvä Team talked about their story so far, what they have recently been developing (spoiler alert: A LOT!) plus their exciting vision for the future.
A brief history of time Hyvä
For those uninitiated, Hyvä was founded in 2020 by Willem Wigman when he was, like most of us, questioning whether starting a new Magento project with the “Luma” Theme was the best we could do. However, unlike most of us, he took matters into his own hands, started the whole thing from scratch and developed a game-changing solution to many developers’ burdens. Out of this divine intervention, Hyvä Themes was born. This essentially replaced the deprecated Luma theme with a modern tech stack using some of our favourite technologies such as Tailwind & Alpine JS, plus much more technical wizardry. With this reconsidered approach comes blazing-fast performance, reduced code bloat and much happier developers!
Hyvä has been a success story from the off, currently it powers over 5,500 stores across 81 countries and has seen 100% year over year growth in customers, revenue and company size, impressive stuff.
At Unified we were early adopters of Hyvä, we attended Hyvä Camp way back in the strange days of 2022 and rolled out our first Hyvä project for Fixfast soon afterwards. Since then we’ve utilised the power of Hyvä on some fantastic brands including Sophie Conran, Partridge Jewellers and Rab.
Going beyond the theme, introducing Hyvä Commerce
As impressive as Hyvä Themes may be, previously it was tied to the limitations of the Magento platform itself. With Adobe focusing their future developments on Enterprise solutions and moving towards a SaaS model, Magento as it’s always been known was drifting towards the sunset. Not anymore. Hyvä is building on the base of the Magento we’ve known for years and evolving it into a modern solution, bringing in features that have long been a pain point for merchants and developers alike. This will be known as Hyvä Commerce.
Sidenote: Hyvä Commerce is a product package containing Hyvä Theme, Hyvä UI, Hyvä Checkout & the new Admin features listed below in one single package. It will work on Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce. In addition, Hyvä Enterprise can be purchased as an add-on if your store has B2B Suite and Commerce features such as Loyalty Points, Gift Cards etc.
The evolution may not be televised, but I’m here to tell you all about it…
Hyvä CMS
Content editing in Magento has always been functional at best. With Magento Page Builder, you often need some HTML/CSS knowledge and a boatload of patience to get anything better than the frankly quite dated standard components. Enter Hyvä CMS, a completely re-imagined content editing experience that finally puts the power (and fun!) back into the hands of marketers and content editors.
It’s a beautiful, intuitive interface that feels similar to modern editors like Storyblok than the somewhat clunky setup we’ve had to put up with in the past. Block-based editing, inline previews, and flexible layout tools make building pages a breeze and better yet, it’s fully integrated with Magento, so accessing product or category data is seamless and doesn’t require external plugins or workarounds.
The Hyvä CMS is being built with performance and flexibility in mind, it works out of the box with Hyvä Themes and will grow alongside the platform. It’s still in Early Access, but based on what we’ve seen, this is likely to be a game-changer for content management on Magento.
I was genuinely blown away by the CMS demo and how much the Hyvä team has been able to achieve in a short period of time. The Hyvä road-map that signposts future features such as a new Menu Builder and Customer Segmentation, indicates that they have no plans of slowing down any time soon.
Admin refresh
First impressions count and being honest, Magento’s Admin Panel is starting to look a little tired. It's over 10 years old and is starting to show signs of age. While it's always been functional, it never quite delights merchants the way modern SaaS platforms do.
Hyvä’s Admin Refresh is a visual update that brings a clean, modern, and simplified look and feel to the Magento backend. It’s still the same Admin underneath (meaning full compatibility with existing extensions and workflows), but now it feels like something you’d actually want to spend time in. Think configurable widgets, brandable panels, customisation options and a fresh lick of paint - a simple but important step toward making Magento feel like a competitive modern platform again.
Image editor
If you’ve used modern SaaS platforms, you’re probably familiar with simple, browser-based tools to crop, resize, or annotate images without ever leaving the CMS. Now, Hyvä brings this same functionality to Magento.
The Hyvä Image Editor allows merchants and content editors to tweak images directly in the admin, while preserving the original file. This means no more bouncing between image editing tools and Magento or asking a developer to re-upload an image with slightly different cropping. It’s small quality-of-life improvements like this that build real merchant trust and reduce unnecessary blockers.
Media optimiser
In the race for optimal performance, images are often the main culprit of slow speeds. The Hyvä Media Optimiser tackles this head-on by allowing your store to:
Automatically resize images to different dimensions
Convert to modern, performant formats like WebP or AVIF
Serve appropriately sized images depending on the user's device
Access all of this via a developer-friendly API
While we’ve helped our merchants improve their site speed since before the days of Hyvä, we have a handful of solutions already. However, Hyvä is once again simplifying the stack and baking image optimisation in to their full product package.
One more thing… Hyvä Academy
As Hyvä grows, so does the community around it. Now there's a way to officially validate your skills. The Hyvä Certification offers developers a way to stand out from the crowd, much like the Shopify Partner Academy.
We’re encouraging our team at Unified to go for it, not just because we love a shiny badge… this is a clear signal that Hyvä is evolving beyond the theme, it’s gaining momentum and it's here to stay.
Turns out, the evolution was televised — and you can watch the recent Hyvä Townhall here to see it for yourself. It’s well worth your time if you’re curious about the future of Hyva or just want to see a community that’s genuinely pushing things forward.
Ready to explore Hyvä Commerce?
If you're a merchant looking to modernise your Magento store get in touch with Unified, we’d love to walk you through what’s new and help you decide if it’s the right fit for your next project.
We’ve been all-in on Hyvä since the early days and it’s never been more exciting than right now.
