Future-proof Ecommerce

Since the company was founded in 1989, entrepreneurship, expertise and a passion for gardening have driven Blomsterlandet to become Sweden’s largest retailer of flowers and plants. They have 61 stores across the country and a strong brand within the industry. 

By challenging themselves, listening to their customers' needs and having the courage to push forward constantly, Blomsterlandet has succeeded in innovating significantly over the last 30 years. When Valtech started the collaboration with Blomsterlandet, they were facing their biggest challenge ever: to transform the business digitally and meet the needs of their customers of tomorrow.

Blomsterlandet is a Swedish chain with 61 stores from Malmö in the south to Luleå in the north. Customers can also buy online. In Blomsterlandet’s stores you can buy everything from a simple tulip to large flower arrangements for the wedding of your dreams. Blomsterlandet buys its plants directly from the grower, simplifying the supply chain. The idea is to provide locally cultivated plants, first and foremost.

When Blomsterlandet came to Valtech, they already had an e-commerce solution in place, but it no longer met their needs for speed, responsiveness and a seamless shopping experience.

At the same time, the florist landscape was experiencing new competition and was increasing adopting online commerce. Blomsterlandet needed to increase its digital presence to meet customer demands.

In addition to its large variety of plants, it became clear in our discovery work that knowledge and advice form an important part of Blomsterlandet’s offering. Enabling customers to learn about how to grow and cultivate plants by providing advice and guides was a key part of making the entire offering available digitally. The team was faced with new types of questions and design challenges such as: How do we design an e-commerce site that inspires and guides customers? How do we combine Blomsterlandet’s expertise with their products?

It’s a given that cannot be overstated: purchasing behaviors and challenges differ in different industries. Target groups and their driving forces can vary greatly. For this reason, the team interviewed a lot of customers in the Discovery Phase—both those who shopped in-store and those who shopped online. After the interviews, the responses were analysed, and then we went back to the digital drawing board and started to ideate and work on the solution.

Among the insights, we identified that many customers worried that flowers they were buying online would wither in transit. We therefore had to make it clear to the customer through the design and content of the site that Blomsterlandet would take responsibility for the well-being of the plants throughout the journey to reach them.

Blomsterlandet’s previous solution could no longer meet the demands of Blomsterlandet’s customers or internal stakeholders, and it did not have the features and capabilities you would expect from a modern e-commerce solution. With their new technical platform, Blomsterlandet can now take the next step to develop both e-commerce and service offerings to reach new target groups.

By gathering data from multiple sources in an “Integration Hub,” it is possible to build new solutions for channels other than e-commerce—for example, apps and in-store solutions. We have also focussed heavily on making the site fast and responsive. This was made possible by building the front-end in React, while the back-end has been developed in Optimizely Commerce.