Oroton makes agility its signature style, moving 6x faster with Contentful

For nearly 90 years, Australian luxury brand Oroton has built its reputation on quality and craftsmanship, growing from its roots in accessories into handbags, apparel, jewelry, and more. As the brand and its digital business evolved, so did the experiences its teams needed to deliver.

Oroton’s ecommerce team had no shortage of ideas. The problem was that bringing them online could take weeks or even months. By rebuilding its content operations with Contentful, Oroton cut launch times and improved product discovery while giving ecommerce teams more control over the customer experience.

“By the time [devs] delivered a solution, it would be six months to six weeks down the line. This wasn’t cutting it in an industry where trends and customer preferences seemingly shift overnight,” shared Romika Rodrigo, Ecommerce and Trade Manager at Oroton.

When campaign opportunities moved faster than development cycles, Oroton risked missing the moment entirely.

Oroton needed a way to launch campaigns faster and stay competitive without compromising the distinctive brand look and feel that Oroton customers have come to expect. To tackle this challenge, the retailer adopted Contentful from Salesforce as the content foundation for its ecommerce experience. Today, Oroton’s ecommerce team has greater freedom to edit existing content and bring new ideas to market that continuously evolve the customer experience, while developers can focus on building reusable capabilities rather than one-off solutions.

Finding a better fit for content management

To test out Contentful, the team started with a focused proof of concept: site navigation. The existing navigation was built around the limitations of Oroton’s old, disjointed tech stack, rather than the needs of its customers and ecommerce team. Working with Contentful, Oroton rebuilt its navigation to be dynamic and editable in real time, giving the ecommerce team greater control over how customers moved through the site.

The result, as Rodrigo puts it, was measurable and immediate: “We've actually had our discoverability lift by 9%, from session start to viewing a product, which is a great improvement year on year post doing that project." 

The project became a proof point for a different way of working. Instead of asking developers to build and update individual experiences, Oroton created a library of flexible components, or content types, incorporating Oroton’s brand principles that its Marketing and Ecommerce teams can pull from and manage to edit and create content. Today, the team is using those elements to build promotion banners, ads, product detail pages, and gift finders free of development.

Bringing content to market with speed and style

Today, it takes marketers less than one week to stand up new content and even less time to make minor changes, a 6x boost in go-to-market speed.

“Contentful’s quickly reduced the amount of time it takes to make changes on the website. Say I want to update the Terms and Conditions on a specific product detail page, it’s quite simple and takes just five minutes,” said Rodrigo. 

That speed and autonomy become especially valuable during Oroton’s busiest shopping moments. Ahead of major promotions like Black Friday and Boxing Day, the team can prepare campaign-specific navigation, banners, messaging, and SEO content, preview the complete experience in pre-production, and have everything ready to publish when the promotion begins.

Behind the scenes, Oroton has changed how those promotional experiences are structured, too. Dedicated sale pages can dynamically evolve from one promotion to the next instead of requiring the team to create and eventually remove new categories and pages for every campaign. The approach has helped Oroton reduce redirects and 404s while improving SEO.

Tailoring the digital storefront to every market and channel 

Contentful also helps Oroton adapt its digital experience for a growing global audience. The team can manage regional variations of content and promotions, ensuring customers see messaging relevant to where they’re shopping.

“As soon as a visitor arrives on our website, we identify their location and then Contentful flags which content they are served based on their region,” said Matthew Alexander, Senior Digital Solutions Manager.

Regional relevance doesn’t come at the expense of the brand experience. Oroton’s teams coordinate across digital and retail, bringing the same campaigns and creative concepts to life wherever customers encounter the brand.

“Our digital and retail teams collaborate really closely with one another to ensure what’s in the store window is reflected in the content online. It’s all synchronized and consistent regardless of where the customer is engaging with us,” added Rodrigo.

Giving shoppers more to discover with creativity

Before Contentful, the cost and development time associated with more ambitious ecommerce experiences sometimes meant Oroton didn't pursue them at all. Ideas such as digital gift guides could take too long to build for a fixed campaign window, causing the team to miss the opportunity entirely. With reusable experiences in Contentful, similar ideas can now be brought to market in weeks or, when needed, days.

Now, Oroton’s developers can build custom experiences in Contentful that put control in the hands of the ecommerce team. Gift guides can be created as configurable experiences that marketers can populate and adapt for different campaigns, rather than requiring a new build each time.

“With Contentful, the dev team is no longer asked to build a one-off banner or content that looks a certain way.  Instead we collaborate on designing new experiences that might be used to display a banner in a number of different ways, all configurable by the user.  Each experience provides value to the team now and for the future, ” said Alexander.

The shift has also changed the relationship between Oroton’s ecommerce and development teams. Instead of asking developers to execute individual banners, pages, or design changes, ecommerce can describe the experience it wants and the controls it needs. Developers can then build reusable tools and capabilities that support that experience today and can be adapted for future campaigns.

The result is a richer digital storefront, with more opportunities for customers to discover products through intentional, brand-led experiences.

Setting new trends with AI

Oroton isn't finished rethinking how its teams create digital experiences. Next, the retailer is exploring how Contentful's MCP server can bring AI into its workflows and eliminate even more of the manual work between an idea and its execution.  

One area the team is testing is the connection between design and content creation. Today, marketing designs new homepage experiences that the ecommerce team then builds separately for desktop and mobile, with additional variations for customers across different markets. Altogether, that can mean creating six versions of essentially the same page every two weeks — a process that can take around eight hours.

Oroton is exploring a workflow that connects its AI tooling with Contentful and, eventually, Figma, allowing an agent to take on much of that repetitive assembly work.

The team is also testing the technology as it moves decades of existing editorial content into Contentful. Rather than rebuilding pages manually, the team is using MCP-assisted workflows to do much of the initial assembly before human review. Work that previously took two to three hours can now take less than 20 minutes for review and QA.

Getting ready for next season's updates

Next, Oroton is exploring experiences such as shoppable lookbooks that would allow ecommerce teams to turn existing creative into interactive shopping experiences with minimal manual assembly.

For Oroton, the goal is to take repetitive production work off their plates, giving marketing, ecommerce, and development teams more time to focus on the experiences they want to create next in pursuit of a truly luxury shopping experience. For a brand 90 years in the making, Contentful’s platform has unlocked opportunities as big as the imagination of their teams.