Rituals Customer Identity Access Management at Google Scale

The Challenge

Rituals was relying on an external partner to manage its user authentication service across web, mobile, and retail touchpoints. With more than 30 million customer records, the system was mission-critical, but:

Costs were rising significantly with each active user.
The provider was being phased out, with a full shutdown planned by 2027.
Scalability and flexibility were limited, making it harder to adapt login flows or integrate with existing systems.

Rituals needed a replacement that could handle massive scale, integrate with Google Cloud, and support their move towards a headless architecture.

The Goal

Rituals needed a business-wide, customizable, and secure customer identity access management (CIAM) service that would:

Allow users to log in seamlessly across web, app, and retail systems.
Synchronise user data in real-time across channels.
Reduce costs per user while increasing performance and reliability.
Lay the foundation for their long-term digital strategy, including headless commerce.

Success meant a future-proof CIAM that improved user satisfaction, cut costs, and scaled effortlessly with Rituals’ global growth.

About our customer

Founded in 2000 by Dutch CEO Raymond Cloosterman, cosmetic brand Rituals has grown excessively; from one store in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam to more than 800 stores, 1500 shop-in-shops, and four urban wellness centers in 27 countries all over the world. Rituals has expanded into the U.S., Asia, and other territories and continues to compete with more well-established brands, so delivering a superior shopping experience is vital. The company has evolved into an omnichannel retailer with significant online sales, and its results speak for themselves.

The retail company offers a combination of home and body cosmetics in their stores and on their website rituals.com. Rituals unite advanced technology with ancient far Eastern rituals to present a range of affordably priced products that turn everyday routines like bathing and shaving into meaningful rituals

Visit their website →

The Solution

Crystalloids supported Rituals in migrating to the Google Identity Platform, a modern CIAM solution tightly integrated with Google Cloud services. The new architecture was designed to be multi-regional, ensuring high availability across Europe with failover capabilities between Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France.

To connect the platform seamlessly with existing systems, the team developed custom APIs that integrated with the Rituals website, the Rituals app, the Genie app, and the order management system. Security was embedded into every layer of the design: Apigee was implemented as an API proxy to validate requests and ID tokens, while Cloud Armour provided an extra layer of protection against external threats.

User experience was also a top priority. New login features such as magic link authentication and secure password reset flows were introduced, eliminating the need to store passwords internally and providing a faster, smoother login process for customers.

A major challenge - linking authentication data with customer records was solved by creating a real-time synchronisation process between the Google Identity Platform and the Contact API, ensuring that customer data was consistently accurate and up to date across channels.

This was not a gradual transition but a carefully executed implementation, impacting 30 million members simultaneously across Rituals’ digital touchpoints.

The Result

The launch of Rituals’ new CIAM Customer Identity Access Management was a success, delivering both measurable business benefits and strategic advantages:

30 million users migrated, with secure re-authentication flows in place.
API response times improved from up to a few seconds to under 200 milliseconds.
Operational costs were significantly reduced per active user.
Customer experience improved with faster login and better data synchronisation.
Future-ready foundation for integrating B2B users, social logins, and further digital expansion.

Internally, the project also marked a strategic milestone: moving away from legacy systems toward a flexible, headless architecture, fully powered by Google Cloud.

The launch of CIAM marks an important strategic milestone for Rituals. This was a true ‘big bang’ implementation, impacting over 30 million members across all our digital touchpoints - the website, consumer app, Genie app, and our stores. It was also a remarkable cross-functional achievement, bringing together multiple Rituals departments and seven external partners to make this success possible.

Sr. Data Analyst

Rituals

Rituals: A Future-Proof Customer Identity Access Management at Google Scale

By migrating from a costly, external identity provider to Google Identity Platform, Rituals streamlined operations, cut costs, and launched a secure, scalable login system for over 30 million users worldwide.