A storied ski brand reaches the peak of customer experience.
Rossignol doubled online clothing sales by migrating to Magento Commerce.
70%
Increase in conversion
Products:
The historic ski brand needed a platform for the future.
Established over a hundred years ago in France, the iconic winter sports brand, Rossignol, was one of the first companies to produce plastic skis. Drawing from a century of expertise and a close relationship with the champions of winter sports, Rossignol has created a range of hi-tech equipment and clothing, from ski goggles to snowboards. Today, the Rossignol Group comprises nearly a dozen sub-brands, catering to both amateurs and experts of alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, snowboarding, cycling and trail running.
Like many heritage brands, the Rossignol Group needed to reposition their image to stay relevant. They decided to move away from the company’s rustic traditions and escape their association with mountain chalets. They launched a fashionable new range aimed at mainstream consumers, including a collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger; but they wanted to switch from B2B to become a consumer-centric company. However, Rossignol’s now defunct web solution, RBS Change, made progress impossible. “We had one platform for CMS and another for e-commerce,” explained Damien Hars, Head of Digital Marketing and E-commerce for Rossignol. “Two different platforms to manage one website. It was a nightmare.”
Rossignol, a brand that thrives on extreme challenges, asked Synolia, a Magento Solution Partner, to revolutionise their digital presence. They needed to unify their sub-brands, expand their winning loyalty programme and deliver an unrivalled customer experience, globally. “We had very ambitious plans to launch e-commerce to offer every brand, in every country, in 18 months,” said Hars. To do that, they needed a new platform.
“Web merchandisers in Europe and North America are working in the same back office on a daily basis. Everybody feels well co-ordinated and part of a global team. This is the basis of success!”
Damien Hars
Head of Digital Marketing and E-commerce, the Rossignol Group
Rossignol discovered the “perfect” e-commerce solution.
The new Rossignol web store was created on Magento Commerce, which helped to unify their complicated, siloed business with multiple brands running on different backend systems. Rossignol started the project with their bicycle brand, Time, integrating Commerce Cloud with the company’s backend systems. “Magento is in the middle of everything for us now,” explained Hars. “It’s connected to our ERP, our warehouse system for prep and delivery and our PIM, to manage all product descriptions... Every person working on e-commerce, from marketing and sales to customer service, is using the same platform. It’s perfect,” he said.
To roll out their plans for world domination, Rossignol started by implementing plugins to make international expansion a breeze. They used Owebia for delivering management, an extension that defines delivering rules by country; Maxmind for geo location services; and Hipay, to allow perfect payments in any country. Now, Rossignol fans can order skis and snowboard equipment from almost anywhere in the world. “What I really like about Magento is that we have many plugins and partners that we can easily add,” said Hars. “We’re sure that we’re creating the best-in-class experience for the consumer.”
“With Magento, we have the best of both worlds: customisation of the customer experience with the scalability of a cloud infrastructure.”
Damien Hars
Head of Digital Marketing and E-commerce, the Rossignol Group
Eight countries in four months
In November of 2017, after just four months, Rossignol launched e-commerce operations in eight countries, four languages and four currencies. The results were spectacular: “The global navigation and the checkout process is much easier on Magento than it was on our previous platform,” said Hars. “We can see that in the conversion rate.” Management of the web store is also much easier. “For us, it’s just so easy to create attractive pages...and easier to give more autonomy to our merchandising teams in different countries.”
The Magento Commerce platform doubled the brand’s turnover compared to the previous year and exceeded their goals for online sales by almost 25 per cent. Rossignol’s new e-commerce strategy is paying off as their conversion rate has jumped by 70 per cent, partly due to their new UX and the reliability of the infrastructure provided by Magento Commerce. Today, they enjoy much faster response times than those offered by the old platform. And this is just the beginning of Rossignol’s ambitious expansion strategy. Next up is the refresh of their North American store later this year and the migration of two new brands before the end of the year, Raidlight and Vertical. “Magento is super easy for us, we can just create new shops,” said Hars. “For us it’s just perfect, it’s very good for teamwork.”
The migration to Commerce Cloud also allowed Rossignol to re-engineer their loyalty programme, “The Club,” which offers customers access to exclusive offers and events. Now, customers accumulate points when they shop in a physical store or even with a dealer or partner of the brand. Naturally, the programme gathers valuable insights about customers’ buying habits, used to optimise the performance of marketing campaigns. “After nine months we’ve increased loyalty, thanks to Magento,” said Hars.