By Malene Birger: Fuels Expansion Plans with STEP
Fashion & lifestyle
+40 countries
Focus on the planet and people through circulation, partners, rent the look, etc.
2003
Maja Dixdotter
Stibo Systems STEP
E-commerce as a door-opener to expansion
The fashion company, By Malene Birger, wants to expand both geographically and online. The international fashion brand believes strongly in e-commerce as a door-opener to new customers and markets.
challenges
- Complex seasonal product life cycle with numerous product changes to master and track
- Maintain uniform data quality and brand
- Reduce dependency on other internal systems and create a single source of information about products
The Stibo Systems platform, STEP, connects this rather complex business and ensures a persistent focus on strategy execution.
In the space of just a few years, By Malene Birger has realised what many fashion brands dream of. The Danish designer label started out as a small company, but quickly developed into an international brand that is sold in more than 40 countries worldwide.
A persistent focus on its business and the core concept – luxury styles at affordable prices – has paved the way for By Malene Birger’s growth. The direction is set for further expansion.
We not only need more stores, but also want to be present in more countries, and this decision moves e-commerce up on the agenda. It is easier to test and gather the first expressions of new markets online so that the internet becomes an important channel to us.
Today, By Malene Birger styles can be found in 900 shops around the world, including 14 of their own brand stores in Europe. The company wants these numbers to grow, and e-commerce plays a central role in the plans.
So far, online has been of less importance to By Malene Birger, but this will change dramatically.
Geared for growth
Tobias Dara Kankelborg, E-Commerce Manager at By Malene Birger, explains:
We are determined to minimise the gap between our offline and online activities in order to be able to create the ultimate customer experience, no matter where the customer meets us. However, this requires that we optimise the whole back-office setup. This is where STEP plays a really important role. The infrastructure and processes must be in place before you can launch an omni-channel strategy.
International
By Malene Birger has, from day one, had an international focus. All material is localised into five main languages, and the plan is to address more markets in local languages in the future.
It would be almost impossible to execute on this without STEP. Our focus would be wrong, as we would use all our resources on managing data and photos.
Tobias Dara Kankelborg, E-Commerce Manager at By Malene Birger.
Fuelling cross and upsell
All information and photo management takes place in STEP, which is the core provider of product data to all parts of the company.
It adds a lot of agility to our business that all data is available and fully updated in STEP. Based on the guidelines we receive from the design and purchasing department, we can easily prepare new looks in STEP in order to exploit cross- and upsell opportunities as much as possible.
Tobias Dara Kankelborg, E-Commerce Manager at By Malene Birger.
A central hub
Tobias Dara Kankelborg has vast experience with e-commerce from several companies. He joined By Malene Birger when STEP was being implemented and sees it as an important step forward to working with the platform.
"In many companies the individual departments draw raw data directly from the ERP system and process them for individual purposes. Alternatively, they exchange loads of information and spreadsheets and spend a lot of time controlling versions, etc," he said and continued:
This can be incredibly complex to manage and can lead to many misunderstandings and errors. STEP is like a central hub collecting all information channels. It makes it easy to keep the e-commerce platform fully updated and attractive to the customers.
Business over control
STEP feeds data to many points of contact across all brands, including 3 webshops on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform. The solution includes 300,000 photos and design templates and data on 300,000 products in 7 languages.
Tobias Dara Kankelborg explains the advantages of the solution:
“We save a lot of time on not having to investigate all sorts of systems in order to find out why a style is missing – is it because the photo shoot has not taken place yet, or that the colours have not been determined or something else?”
“This efficiency boost is really valuable because the response time in e-commerce is much shorter than offline.”
“But most importantly, STEP offers an extremely stable platform, relieving us from having to decide on a daily basis whether we are working with the correct product information.”
“Instead, we can concentrate on running the best possible online shop,” said Tobias Dara Kankelborg and added that STEP is also very user friendly.
The solution was implemented in 6 months and continues to create benefits:
- Versioning of complex seasonal collections for multi-channel
- Potential for introducing new collections quickly – with versioning for language and regional needs
- Reducing catalogue production time from weeks, to days
- Continued protection of the brand across all channels
- Support the presence of digital transformation
STEP has many features and can be configured in many different ways, but it never gets complicated since you can easily customise your own views. You can create your own dashboard, which provides only the information you need, making it very easy to work with.
