IDEAL OF SWEDEN ‑ Successfully growing global

IDEAL OF SWEDEN is a startup success story in the making. After starting out by selling phone cases out of their garage, founders Joachim Lindström and Filip Ummer eventually scaled up the digital side of their business by launching an ecommerce store on open‑source platform WooCommerce. With the online store in place, they executed a successful strategy focused on content and influencer marketing which skyrocketed their sales to an averaged annual growth rate of 150% since founding the brand in 2013. 

Today, almost 6 years later, IDEAL is pioneering the ecommerce space and is one of the most hyped digital brands on the market with a yearly revenue of SEK 450 million in 2018 – forecast to double in 2019.

Growing pains

However, scaling a business rapidly isn't possible without a few bumps in the road – and it wasn't long before IDEAL OF SWEDEN started to experience growing pains on the WooCommerce platform.

These pains were mainly:

• Difficulties to scale globally

• Expensive consulting hours for developers

• Cumbersome hours on manual administration

• Hefty costs on hosting

• Recurring downtime

Selling globally with WooCommerce was expensive, time‑consuming and complicated. Every new market implemented needed an individual setup, which stacked up expenses on developer associated consulting fees as a skilled team of developers was needed to handle the complexities of setting up new markets on the open source platform. It also skyrocketed manual administration hours, as every store needed to be handled individually, without a smooth way to transfer information between systems. On top of that, costs of hosting became an issue, as WooCommerce needed to be individually hosted, updated and maintained.

IDEAL OF SWEDEN had outgrown their platform and needed to replatform in order to keep growing successfully.

To do so, they needed to find a platform that understood their needs and solved their pains. A platform with short time‑to‑market, easy implementation, low time and cost of maintenance. Most importantly, they needed a platform that was globally scalable and stable enough to handle their high amount of traffic and orders.

IDEAL OF SWEDEN teamed up with Centra, a SaaS platform, built from an original brand’s perspective since day one. The platform is specifically tailored to simultaneously handle multiple markets, languages and currencies from a single centralized system. It's also extremely flexible, with no limits to design, integrations and customization due to the API‑based, headless build. And with Centra's built‑in PIM system, IDEAL OF SWEDEN is able to seamlessly carry out their complex strategy on a global level.

The Microsoft Navision ERP system was selected to handle transactions, and the ecommerce specialized frontend agency, Grebban, was chosen to design the new site which was delivered on time and within the budget in less than six months. Tailored to the needs of a modern digital brand, the new site makes use of Centra’s “Display” functionality to present products in the most compelling way to each visitor. It’s also built for fast implementation in new markets, with support for individual languages, pricing and the highest converting PSP providers for each individual market.

With these pieces in place, IDEAL was now ready to aggressively increase their global presence.

IDEAL OF SWEDEN's current e-commerce tech-stack on Centra

After launching the new site in November, IDEAL OF SWEDEN has seen great improvements to their operations.

This includes:

• Rapid multi‑market scalability

• A reliable, site built to handle 1,000,000 orders daily

• Increased conversion rates

• A decrease in developer based consulting costs

• Zero downtime

• Less time spent on admin, thanks to Centra's built in PIM system

IDEAL OF SWEDEN went live with locally customized online stores in some 20+ new markets and are continuously expanding their global presence. With up to 10,000 orders per day and a record‑breaking 11 orders per second during the peak hours of Black Friday 2019 – Centra guarantees full performance and zero downtime no matter what. And by controlling all individual markets from one system, alongside the clever built in PIM, IDEAL has been able to vigorously cut down time and money spent on administration to instead focus these resources on growing their business and carrying out their strategy on a global level.