How a high-end audio-visual company is making significant ecommerce gains with Contentful
Bang & Olufsen is a global luxury lifestyle brand founded in 1925 in Struer, Denmark, by Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen whose devotion and vision remain the foundation for the company. The rich heritage built around the relentless determination to create products that push the boundaries of audio technology continues to place the company at the forefront of audio innovation. Today, every Bang & Olufsen product is still characterized by the unique combination of beautiful sound, timeless design, and unrivalled craftsmanship. The company’s innovative and progressive audio products are sold worldwide in Bang & Olufsen monobrand stores, online, and in multibrand stores. The company employs around 900 people and operates in more than 70 markets.
Bang & Olufsen leads the way in luxury audio-visual design and production. The Danish brand has been improving speakers, headphones, and televisions for more than 90 years — now reaching their customers through 700+ stores and multiple online channels. Their old monolithic ecommerce and CMS platform wasn’t keeping up. A microservice stack with Contentful at the center has changed all that.
The challenge
B&O wanted to meet its customers where they’re at — in their regions and languages, on all their personal devices and in-store displays.
But it didn’t have the tools to get there.
It had one monolithic platform that included both its ecommerce tools and content management system. This setup limited its ability to connect with individual customers and communicate a consistent message across multiple channels. Their product website and digital store were separate sites, and B&O struggled to connect online and in-store sales systems. Despite the shared platform, nothing ran seamlessly.
Moving faster with microservices
A microservice structure with headless components solved B&O’s problems. This deconstructed architecture gave it the necessary flexibility to design and implement customer experiences both online and in stores.
B&O deployed Contentful, which is built on AWS, as its headless CMS and Commercetools for ecommerce. Contentful’s extensibility, quick response times, and simple ways of creating and supporting a range of content also motivated their decision to rebuild. The two services are built to work with other components. They not only work well together, but they enabled B&O to expand with other microservices whenever needed.
Powered by Contentful and Commercetools, B&O merged its two websites into one. Now customers could learn about and purchase the latest products in one place. It also connected their ecommerce and all in-store IT systems. Contentful powers in-store digital experiences with consistent content, regardless of the store’s presentation technology.
The numbers say it all
Tomas Krag, director of ecommerce at B&O, says they’ve been tracking the numbers and they look great:
- Load times decreased from 16-20 seconds to 3-4 seconds
- Ecommerce conversion rate increased by 60%
- Cart-to-checkout rate of progression has more than doubled
- Average order value has increased by 13%
- Conversion rate from online store search is three times higher
B&O isn’t the only enterprise to trust Contentful when moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices stack. Forrester Research Inc. says that Contentful's “API-first and cloud-native approach excels," and that "Contentful is a good fit for progressive digital initiatives that want to unify content services across channels and projects." Access the entire report here.