Luhta - webstore in record time

Luhta, the largest Nordic textile company, set an ambitious goal of developing the Group’s online stores centrally by collecting all group brands under the new luhta.com platform—in record time. With an outstanding team, this rapid development project was a success and Luhta’s new online store was opened just in time for Black Friday.

Luhta

At the outset, Luhta had over 10 brand-specific online stores and sites that were developed and operated separately. Due to this, the Group suffered from technological disintegration and slow online sales, and customer flow was dispersed between different services. Further development of these services was difficult because they all operated on their own platforms and synergies could not be realized between them. In terms of sales, this collection of online stores did not serve Luhta’s objectives, and developing those services separately wasn’t expected to bring about the required growth. On top of that, the Luhta brand itself did not have its own online store.

Luhta embarked on the development project with a clear objective: the new online store under the Luhta brand was to go live by Black Friday. The project team was staffed with the best design, software development, online store, payment service and search engine optimization experts. Luhta selected Lamia to lead the multivendor project and to deliver technologies and software development.

case Luhta

Scalable technologies enable further development

Opportunities for further development and search engine friendliness were emphasized in the selection of technologies. With the help of Lamia, Luhta’s digital sales architecture became modular and scalable in order to enable further development. In software development, the selected frontend framework was Vue. Vue was a sensible choice because it enabled rapid development and, as an extremely fast technology, it increases search engine visibility. Vue’s architecture and user interface are also agile in terms of further development.

Strict prioritization during the building process

In the software development phase, Black Friday was the deadline and only two months away. Lamia assigned over 10 experts to take care of this tough project, ranging from designers and software developers to SEO wizards and project managers. The project’s scope and use cases were kept under tight control in order to maintain focus on the schedule and quality, as well as in delivering a holistic solution that works well for end-customers. Luhta determined the schedule, on the basis of which Lamia prioritized features needed to build a functional service.

The new online store was published three days before Black Friday.

The whole project and the excellent Black Friday sales figures constituted a significant milestone for Luhta in terms of online sales potential. The rapid development model proved its worth as well: luhta.com’s time to market beat all records, and the project provided a plausible and feasible roadmap for further development.

Luhta

Ambitious goals for further development

The next goal has already been set and will focus on significant expansion of the current solution. Brand alignment work also continues. In addition to centralizing all the brands on the same platform, each of them will get an advanced customized brand experience. The user experience will be optimized further with new functionalities. The site will also be expanded with new language versions, and new CMS tools will be rolled out across the Luhta Group. The roadmap entails centralizing all Luhta’s local and international sites on the same platform, where they can be developed sustainably and in a controlled manner.

The service can be expanded and developed significantly as the technical setup is tailor-made to support online business scalability. Luhta has already succeeded in harnessing new sales and customer experience potential, and with the online store expansion, this growth will continue. “It’s great to be among the builders supporting Luhta’s journey—a smart technical setup enables a quick response to the constant changes in the operating environment,” says Lauri Järvenpää, Advisor, Technologies at Lamia.

Rapid development in a nutshell

Rapid development is a software development method that enables accelerated time to market for digital services. It combines technical, process and specification expertise. In practice, it means creating a plausible roadmap for the service and deciding on the first go-live date, by which time the service has to include all the features the end-user needs in order to use the service. That means that many features are actually missing from the first version and added to the roadmap.

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