Barnas Hus is the leading provider of baby and children’s clothing and accessories in Norway. Founded in 1993, the company currently negotiates several known brands (Bugaboo, Emmaljunga, Stokke, Babyjogger, BeSafe, Cybex, Maxi-Cosi, BabyBjörn, Philips Avent, and its own brands, Reflex and Yngri) through its chain of 28 physical stores across Norway, stretching from Kristiansand in the south to Tromsø in the north.
Alongside the company’s traditional stores, Barnas Hus has been driving the successful deployment of its digital commerce, implementing a sophisticated online business for meeting future customer requirements and demands. And the tactic seems to have paid off. In 2020 the company saw 100 million NOK in online revenue which was a 38% (17%) increase compared to the previous year.
The success of Barnas Hus’ business comes from consistent delivery of high-quality clothing, services, and competence. When building the company’s online business, one of the key challenges was to provide these values equally good online but also manifesting its presence across online channels – where future parents expect to find them.
As a part of the HTS company group, Barnas Hus faced a few inherited challenges along their online journey. The new e-commerce system needed to comply with the HTS company standard CRM (Microsoft Dynamics 365), something that the previous system had failed to do. Maintaining great performance and eliminating system downtime as the number of visitors grew, was another important success factor. Faced with these requirements, it soon became clear that a combination of Optimizely (formerly known as EPI Server) and Voyado Elevate would be the best solution for Barnas Hus and that Sweden based Avensia would be the ideal partner to implement the system.
Having long experience from integrating combinations of Dynamics 365, EPI Server, Elevate and Storefront, Avensia quickly got Barnas Hus’ digital business journey on track, building a state-of-the-art e-commerce solution which would handle the rapidly growing number of visitors, even during peak commerce events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
With this setup, Voyado Elevate provides a best of breed search, navigation, and recommendation functionality for guiding, advising, and inspiring online shoppers. Before implementing Elevate, response times were often slow affecting the overall experience of the site negatively. Hopes were high on bringing up the degree of relevancy on recommendations to a much higher level and to increase the number of products purchased with the average order. Elevate is highly automated, and as it turned out, the system immediately contributed with positive effects on relevancy in both searches and recommendations.
Barnas Hus sees huge potential in Elevate. The system is rich in functionalities for improving the overall performance of the company’s online sales. This functionality will gradually be implemented over time. At this point, the biggest improvement has come from the Elevate search which now is drastically more relevant for shoppers in general.
The ability to better display and recommend products, now more in line with visitors’ intentions, has contributed to increasing the conversion rate by 15% the first six months of 2021. Elevate has also contributed to a positive trend on the average order quantity.
And Barnas Hus will continue to capitalise on their e-commerce investment.
“We see bigger potential with Elevate that we leverage in the months to come. We believe that Elevate can help us be more efficient as online merchandisers but above all, to increase our online sales,” said Øyvind Seielstad Johnsen, Head of Online at Barnas Hus.
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