In February 1998, Steinar J. Olsen founded Stormberg, one of Norway’s largest hiking clothing and equipment brands. Since the start, the company has been working continuously to reduce the climate and environmental impact. Part of the Stormberg mission is to contribute to creating a better world/community and each year the company donates 1% of the total turnover to different social and humanitarian initiatives.
In 2010 and 2013, Stormberg was named “e-commerce of the year” in Norway, a title they have ambitions to reclaim and have a big potential to do so based on their business concept and the people working in the organization.
Today, with more than 20 years of experience in selling hiking clothing developed for the Nordic climate and conditions, Stormberg has about 30 physical stores in Norway in addition to its e-commerce store. In 2020, Stormberg had revenues of approximately 350M NOK.
In March 2020, Covid-19 hit Stormberg hard and many of their physical stores were forced to close for a period. At the same time, the company experienced an uplift in their e-commerce sales which lasted throughout the whole of 2020, and into 2021.
With an e-commerce store growing rapidly with more than 9000 products, one of the biggest challenges was to meet the rapid changes in weather, seasonality, and trends across the entire site such as navigation menus, product sorting and recommendations. They struggled to show relevant products meeting these fast changes and sorting manually was simply too complicated and time-consuming.
The recommendations were simply not based on the relevance of the customer behaviour. Also, the search was quite limited showing non-relevant products and didn’t take user/purchase history into consideration. It was also cumbersome to work with for Stormbergs development team.
Stormberg was looking for an e-commerce solution that could bring them to the forefront against the big sports retailers, by giving their customers a state-of-the-art omnichannel experience as well as connecting the online business to the physical stores.
Until this point, Stormberg had been using a solution based on Magento 2 with integrations to Emarsys, POS and ERP. However, they did not feel that the upgrade to Magento 2 had given them the advantage they needed to take the position they deserved in the market. Instead, they started to look for a proactive partner who could help them bring Stormberg back to the top position of Norwegian sports retailers.
The solution became a new e-commerce site built on Avensia Nitro and Episerver Norge platform, inriver PIM, Voyado and Voyado Elevate for search, navigation and recommendations. The implementation took three months to complete, and the new solutions were launched at the end of June 2021.
With the new solution, including Elevate Product Discovery, results came quickly. After only two months, they could see a significant increase in both average order value and conversions. The total conversion from recommendations increased from 7% to 18% from July onwards. The average order value increased by 16.4% YoY in November 2021. A contributing factor is that relevant products are displayed for each and every customer and that the customers are willing to pay for what they see.
We are so proud of Stormbergs improvements and looking forward to continuing this journey together!
Anders Sundsrud, Head of SEO/CRO at Stormberg
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