SWAROVSKI OPTIK merges headless content and commerce

SWAROVSKI OPTIK, headquartered in Absam, Tyrol, is part of the Swarovski group of companies. Founded in 1949, the Austrian company specializes in the development and manufacturing of long-range optical instruments of the highest precision in the premium segment of the market. With 30+ brick-and-mortar locations and a growing online presence, the family-run Austrian-based company now exports 91% of its products, making successful digital delivery more important than ever.

With a need to serve three customer segments and 92 counties, it became challenging to deliver a consistent experience on a single website. Transactional shop pages, marketing content and the company blog were siloed, creating a fragmented experience across the customer journey. Their monolithic system could not keep up with the speed of launching new features and products across numerous languages and localized shop pages, let alone handle integrations with enterprise third-party software inherited by the Swarovski Group. An inability or lack of flexibility to test, adapt, and make changes quickly without disrupting the customer experience was costing the team time and money. 

Assembling new software with a solution partner

SWAROVSKI OPTIK teamed up with Contentful solution partner Bright IT — a group of technology and marketing experts who combine IT service providers and digital agencies' skills — to help guide the next phase of their digital transformation. Contentful was selected to power the shift to an agile, builder-centric, cloud-native platform powered by API-first technology, ensuring adaptability for both present and future features, channels and technologies. 

Contentful partnered with commercetools, a leading platform for next-generation B2C and B2B commerce, to deliver a lightning-fast web experience to support storefront performance. Contentful’s commercetools app integration allowed customers to easily move between content and products with no lag time, even as updates were being made to the site. The built-in image resizer and optimizer dramatically decreased the number and size of images being delivered to clients, while a React framework facilitated the delivery of optimized content and imagery with pre-made code and integrations, reducing speed to launch.

Breaking the barriers of scalability

Contentful has also resolved many of the barriers SWAROVSKI OPTIK experienced while trying to scale its localization and translation needs. Instead of rewriting content for each language and dialect, the ability to provide localization services on field and entry levels through Contentful allowed editors to reuse translated content across locales, while maintaining the flexibility to customize where needed. The Tags feature has streamlined workflows with translation partners, while Contentful’s modular content structure helped to lower the number of possible combinations of text and images overall, reducing legwork for editors.

Productivity at its finest — thanks to third-part and house-built integrations

Since deployment, SWAROVSKI OPTIK has built two Contentful integrations of their own to help improve editorial productivity. Block visualization allows editorial teams to facilitate more direct editing functionality, while their sitemap browser helps content editors dynamically locate pages within the sitemap at ease.