1. Home
  2. Blog
  3. Success Story: Brabantia

Success Story: Brabantia

After integrating ChannelEngine into our marketplace way of working, we made 2020 a year that marked a massive growth towards maturity for Brabantia as a marketplace Seller
Results summary:

After integrating ChannelEngine into our marketplace way of working, we made 2020 a year that marked a massive growth towards maturity for Brabantia as a marketplace Seller. It shows that even a hundred-year-old established brand can innovate and be at the forefront of e-commerce!

  • We grew from 1 to 10 Seller positions in a one-year timespan
  • The new setup enabled us to deal with COVID-caused vendor shifts in a very efficient way
  • Both of the bullets above ultimately led to a massive growth of Seller turnover
  • A significant decrease in time-to-market for new seller positions
  • Much less capacity needed from own IT department

A roadmap for additional Seller positions in 2021 has been drawn up, fuelled by our ChannelEngine Customer Success Manager's input. At the time of writing, we are already busy with the onboarding of the next new Seller accounts!

Company Overview

From modest beginnings back in 1919, Brabantia has grown into a global, royal interior design brand renowned for bringing smart and stylish design to kitchen and homeware. Brabantia aims to enrich the quality of life and living, making sure that you'll love doing it even more with cleverly designed products no matter what you are doing around the home. Products are so delightful that they transform daily chores into valued rituals.

Brabantia products are available from leading retailers, including high street department stores, superstores, and quality independent kitchen and homeware specialists.

Exploring omnichannel strategies has been a key initiative for Brabantia ever since the launch of Brabantia.com about ten years ago, and this direction became even more prevalent after we started as a marketplace seller back in 2018.

 

The Situation

Brabantia has always tended to solve IT challenges in-house. For this reason, the first Seller connection we made (with Bol Plaza) in 2018 was based on an API that we built ourselves. It worked well, but as platforms change continuously, it needed ongoing maintenance and support from our IT department. It is not a big issue, especially when you're only active on one marketplace.

However, looking at the ambitions to increase our Seller presence over multiple platforms and locales, the decision to step away from our own development was a pretty easy one to make. Developing and maintaining this ourselves would become simply inefficient and limit our possibilities to scale up quickly. For this reason, we started to look around for ways to solve this problem. After discussing this with several other directly selling manufacturers, we quickly realized that we needed to look for a marketplace integrator. For this purpose, and after an extensive research and interview phase, we decided to partner up with ChannelEngine.

 

The Solution

At the beginning of Q1 2020, we have started implementing ChannelEngine as a marketplace integrator in close cooperation with our IT department.

After a successful implementation, many new possibilities opened up for us to become active on certain marketplaces across Europe. It couldn't have been timed better! In the months following our onboarding, we faced a global pandemic and uncertainty of vendor turnover. A significant portion of vendor business was temporarily paused or reduced, after which our newly set up Seller accounts were able to take over much of the lost business. Because of this, we hit the ground running with our ChannelEngine connected marketplaces.

Because we would never have been capable of developing these connections ourselves in such a short time, this meant a stream of revenue that otherwise would have gone lost. Together with our Customer Success Manager at ChannelEngine, we managed to act quickly. We reached all of our Seller goals and ambitions during 2020 and made sure consumers could easily find our products.

arrow_upward