Building an Ecommerce Business Beyond Exposure
A leader in avant-garde outdoor furniture and furnishings, Vondom creates bold statements about form, glamour and innovation. The company is a pillar in design culture, with a powerhouse of designers behind its products that includes Eugeni Quitllet, Ramon Esteve, Ross Lovegrove and Karim Rashid, among others.
Vondom looked to BrandJump in the second half of 2019 with a need for a more strategic approach to its ecommerce business. To maximize the company’s sales opportunity online, BrandJump worked to rebuild and enhance retailer partnerships, organize efforts on the channel into a cohesive program and collaborated with the Vondom team to create an online-first assortment.
“When we started with ecommerce, to be honest, we started that business mainly thinking about the exposure that were going to start getting by working with online partners,” said Vondom CEO Toni Esteve. “But things have evolved really quickly.”
Category: Furniture, Design
Key services: Partner Management, Merchandising
The Challenge
As a small company with limited resources, Vondom was seeing gaps in support for its online business: Communication with retailers was falling through, online sales were stagnant and they were hitting walls in a new partnership with Wayfair, the biggest home décor darling in ecommerce.
Vondom needed to organize its ecommerce business but lacked the resources to effectively manage multiple retailer relationships. The company was also looking for a more targeted online approach: its covetable product collection had experienced great success in showrooms, but it wasn’t translating online. It needed to understand the needs of the online channel—as well as each retailer—to develop a plan to drive more sales.
Strategy + Approach
Engaging BrandJump as a partner was a strategy in itself—Vondom needed more people to help achieve their ecommerce goals, and BrandJump is a bolt-on team that would focus on online sales.
BrandJump first zeroed in on areas that would be most impactful:
Defining an ecommerce assortment. With many multi-option products, Vondom had an extensive catalog to offer. But simple is often more effective for the online shopper and narrowing the SKU count of what’s presented online would help cut out “noise” and make them easier to shop.
Communicating and marketing to retailers. Vondom’s dynamic and innovative collection makes for a brand that retailers love, but they needed more support to build an effective partnership. The BrandJump team was able to quickly become the point of contact and establish a communication process that opened the door to increased marketing opportunities and exposure for Vondom.
Navigating complicated retailers. Vondom knew there was opportunity in selling on Wayfair but had nearly given up after many hurdles trying to transition to working with the retailer directly instead of through a distributor.
“I was very close to giving up on them,” said Vondom CEO Toni Esteve. “We decided to give it a last chance and put it completely in BrandJump’s hands and everything was happily solved.”
With specific experience and expertise in Wayfair, the BrandJump team was able to deep-dive into what was happening with the account, steer the relationship and communication issues and use their knowledge to work within the retailer’s template to clean up product data that was hindering sales.
“Since we started working with BrandJump, our online business became a real business.”
Toni Esteve, Vondom CEO
Results
Partnering with BrandJump helped Vondom sales soar across the online channel.
BrandJump helped streamline the retailer communication process, which had a domino effect leading to better collaboration, higher numbers on retailer scorecards, and an informed promotional strategy. Combining that with improvements to product content and a tighter SKU count, Vondom saw online sales jump 52% year over year in the first year of the partnership.
Sales across Vondom’s top three retail partners have averaged 53% annual growth since the partnership began, while the entire ecommerce channel has averaged 41% growth. Wayfair in particular has seen triple-digit growth.
“Since we started working with BrandJump, our online business became a real business,” Esteve said. “It became a part of the company that it can be considered a business division within the company.”
