Home & Cottage

Omnichannel strategy key to success

B2C
Retail
07/06/2021

Home & Cottage is a Norwegian furniture and home styling company that opened its first store in 2009 and added e-commerce in 2015. Philip Skjelbred, e-commerce manager, talks about their partnership with Litium and how they have made their online store the largest sales channel in the chain.

Number one in the sector within three years 

Philip Skjelbred manages work on the Home & Cottage online store and also works closely with the marketing department and on development of the website. This also includes responsibility for the personnel that create content for the site and fulfilment centre employees. Short and sweet, the entire e-tailing enterprise chain – all the way to the end customer. Skjelbred started working with the company’s digital enterprise in 2015 with a clear aim: 

“My own target from the word go was for the online store to become our biggest sales channel in the chain within the space of three years. We achieved that goal and have doubled sales every year in these first three years. Right now, e-tailing accounts for around 13 percent of our total sales and this figure is rising all the time.  

The business is divided into two parts – furniture and home styling. We initially expected home styling products to be the focus area for online customers, but it pretty quickly became clear that there was a greater interest in furniture.”  
Skjelbred adds: 

“Furniture sales make up over 70 percent of our turnover online. However, sales would never have gone so well if we did not have bricks and mortar stores and our omnichannel strategy is therefore important for us. One would not manage without the other today. We also clearly see that we have significantly higher sales online in areas where we have physical stores.” 

Two upgrades with visual elements in focus 

The Litium platform was the first and only choice when Home & Cottage opened its online store in 2015. Regular discussions have been held with solution partner Columbus since the start to ensure the platform is always in phase with the desired development of the site. This has resulted in recommendations from Columbus on upgrading the Litium platform, for example. Two major upgrades have been done since implementation, mainly to raise visual elements to a higher level.”  
Skjelbred explains: 

“In simple terms, after a while, there was a desire to freshen up the site. Generally speaking, the site has simply got better after the upgrades, even though we have a complex variant management that always entails challenges when implementing upgrades. In my experience without exception, every upgrade has made the Litium platform more user friendly – everything is a bit more plug and play now than before. This is particularly the case with the site content and publishing this in a simple way. 

“Litium – a platform you can rely on” 

Work moving forward includes the development of e-tailing for Home & Cottage in both the short and long term. In the short term, this concerns eliminating possible bugs and ensuring work can continue smoothly while longer term work primarily relates to continuing development work with content.  

On a final note, Skjelbred says: 

“One ongoing element is to further harmonise the appearance of the website with our other marketing work – both digitally and physically, to ensure one coherent whole. As such, it is therefore important that the site is easy to manage and that you can make changes without much expenditure that in turn, make the customer purchasing experience simpler and easier. The great advantage of Litium has always been that it is a platform you can rely on. We have had very few problems if any and everything has been extremely stable across the board. This has been tremendously reassuring in our work with e-commerce.”  

Partner

Columbus
  • Furniture sales make up over 70 percent of our turnover online. However, sales would never have gone so well if we did not have bricks and mortar stores and our omnichannel strategy is therefore important for us. One would not manage without the other today. We also clearly see that we have significantly higher sales online in areas where we have physical stores.

    – Philip Skjelbred, ecommerce manager, Home & Cottage

HomeAndCottage

About Home & Cottage

Home & Cottage is a furniture and interior design chain with 20 stores that was established in 2009 with a clearly defined style expression - an expression we have cultivated under the "vignette" a casual way of living. We buy products from several parts of the world, and find lots of nice and maybe a little different things, which we import directly without expensive intermediaries. With control of the entire value chain, we become unique - at the same time as it reduces our costs. In this way we make nice design that is available and affordable for the many. Find inspiration in our 20 shops in Norway or in our webshop www.homeandcottage.no