LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW may have accomplished the impossible: they’ve made liquorice explode in popularity and transformed the divisive snack into a must-buy, luxury treat. With customers coming in hot, Lakrids by Bülow had to scale their digital commerce way up and customize their web shop to integrate with retail stores. That’s where commercetools came in and won them over.
Mission: Make the world love liquorice
Liquorice. One of the world’s most controversial foods, yet a Scandinavian favorite. In 2007, founder Johan Bülow knew that it was time for liquorice to shed its controversial reputation. He created LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW, a company based out of Denmark that aims to transform liquorice into a beloved snack around the world. And in this mission, LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW has succeeded big time.
LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW grew in popularity so quickly thanks to their go-to market strategy of providing samples – winning people over due to their products' incredible taste – and then through word of mouth. To keep increasing their liquorice-loving fans, LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW launches bold, attention-grabbing campaigns – like their newest SHARE IT WITH A HATER initiative. Their products have particularly found favor with customers who enjoy the finer things in life, and found small boutiques and first-class airline passengers the perfect demographic. Now, they have stores around Europe and the UAE in premium retailers like Harrods.
From physical to digital
Though LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW began selling out of physical retail spaces, they started their digital commerce sales in 2013 using Shopify, but later built their platform on Ucommerce in 2018 for scaling. Now, their digital commerce accounts for one-third of their business (with physical retail and sales through business partners comprising the rest). Unfortunately, Ucommerce could not keep up with LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW’s growth and couldn’t scale horizontally or be customized to integrate other retailers. This was especially apparent during the COVID-19 lockdowns when some of their retail stores closed and sales were shifted to eCommerce, resulting in a 280% growth increase in 2020. Therefore, keeping their commerce platform on Ucommerce for any longer was unthinkable.
When evaluating new commerce solutions, LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW evaluated all the usual big-name vendors, but chose commercetools because scalability and customization is in the platform’s core DNA. commercetools is directly built in the cloud and so can automatically scale for peak performance, and has a headless architecture that allows businesses to pick, choose and easily integrate other vendors for a customized commerce solution that is perfectly tailored for their unique needs.
commercetools was a great choice for us, as we now have a lot of flexibility and scalability to build the digital experiences we want. We tend to want to do things that are not provided by traditional eCommerce offerings and commercetools fits right into our best-of-breed approach to platform architecture.
eCommerce Director, LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW
Time to move on
In July 2020, LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW began their migration and launched their new commerce platform in March 2021. With their systems integrator Kruso and commercetools in the backend, they built a best-of-breed platform consisting of:
Marketing integrations: Segment.com
Payments: Adyen
CMS: Umbraco
ERP: Dynamics Nav
Now, orders are a breeze; they have a peak order uptake of one order every five to six seconds, which their previous platform couldn’t handle before. Plus, any features are easy to adapt as all BI (business intelligence) is in the commerce API. LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW also enjoy having more options and more efficient workflows, as well as all the time saved from having a much faster time-to-market.
What does the future hold? In regard to the upcoming Christmas season, which is the retailer's busiest time of year, their main focus is selling their Christmas specialty products, such as calendars and other items that are made to be shared with friends and family. And even with digital traffic spikes approaching that are four to five times more than their lower seasons, LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW don't need to do any special preparation beyond letting commercetools know and scaling their API server to a higher level to maintain stability and overhead.
For LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW’s long-term digital commerce vision, thanks to their new commerce solution, the possibilities are limitless! At the moment, the retailer plans on creating a deeper integration with their retail stores, implementing a stronger frontend in six to 12 months for more engaging customer experiences and a stronger order management system. With this, they’re on the verge of gaining the US and China as core markets.