Blomsterlandet creates a blooming ecommerce experience

Growing plant sales, online

Since Blomsterlandet was founded in 1989, entrepreneurship, expertise and a passion for gardening have driven the company to become Sweden’s largest retailer of flowers and plants. They have 63 stores across the country and a strong brand within the industry.

By challenging themselves, listening to their customers' needs and having the courage to push forward constantly, Blomsterlandet has succeeded in innovating significantly over the last 30 years. When global digital agency, Valtech, started the collaboration with Blomsterlandet, they were facing their biggest challenge ever - to transform the business digitally and meet the needs of their customers of tomorrow.

Blomsterlandet is a Swedish chain with 61 stores from Malmö in the south to Luleå in the north. Customers can also buy online. In Blomsterlandet’s stores you can buy everything from a simple tulip to large flower arrangements for the wedding of your dreams. Blomsterlandet buys its plants directly from the grower, simplifying the supply chain. The idea is to provide locally cultivated plants, first and foremost.

When Blomsterlandet came to Valtech, they already had an ecommerce solution in place, but it no longer met their needs for speed, responsiveness and a seamless shopping experience.

At the same time, the florist landscape was experiencing new competition and was increasing adopting online commerce. Blomsterlandet needed to increase its digital presence to meet customer demands.

Knowledge - the key to attract customers

In addition to its large variety of plants, it became clear in Valtech's discovery work that knowledge and advice form an important part of Blomsterlandet’s offering. Enabling customers to learn about how to grow and cultivate plants by providing advice and guides was a key part of making the entire offering available digitally. The team was faced with new types of questions and design challenges such as: how to design an ecommerce site that inspires and guides customers? How to combine Blomsterlandet’s expertise with their products?

It’s a given, but it cannot be overstated - purchasing behaviours and challenges differ in different industries. Target groups and their driving forces can vary greatly. For this reason, Valtech interviewed a lot of customers in the Discovery Phase - both those who shopped in-store and those who shopped online. After the interviews, the responses were analysed, and then Valtech went back to the digital drawing board and started to ideate and work on the solution.

Among the insights, Valtech identified that many customers worried that flowers they were buying online would wither in transit. Therefore it was important the design and content of the site made it clear to the customer that Blomsterlandet had expertise in shipping plants and knows how to handle plants to ensure the well-being of the plants.

Technical platform

Blomsterlandet’s previous solution could no longer meet the demands of Blomsterlandet’s customers or internal stakeholders, and it did not have the features and capabilities you would expect from a modern ecommerce solution. With their new technical platform, Blomsterlandet can now take the next step to develop both ecommerce and service offerings to reach new target groups.

By gathering data from multiple sources in an “Integration Hub”, it is possible to build new solutions for channels other than ecommerce - for example, apps and in-store solutions. Valtech also focussed heavily on making the site fast and responsive. This was made possible by building the front-end in React, while the back-end has been developed in Optimizely Commerce.