About Home & Cottage
- Home & Cottage is a furniture and interior design chain that was established in 2009 with a clearly defined style expression. They opened their online store in 2015.
- The client has more than 14 stores in Norway and an online store owned by Øivind Tidemandsen.
Summary of the engagement
Home & Cottage’s goal of making its online store the largest in its chain. That goal was reached together with Columbus as a services partner, and sales have doubled every year for the first three years.
An ongoing discussion with Columbus to achieve the desired website resulted in improved visual appeal and overall user experience.
The online store became the largest store in the chain in three years
Philip Skjelbred leads the work with the online store and works with the marketing department and the website’s development. His responsibilities include managing the employees, who create website content, to the warehouse staff and customers. When he started working with the company’s digital business in 2015, he had a clear ambition:
- My own goal from the start was for the online store to become the largest store in the chain within three years. We reached that goal, and we doubled our turnover every year for the first three years. At present, e-commerce accounts for about 13% of our total turnover, and the share is continually increasing.
Our business is divided into two parts – furniture and interior design. Initially, it was predicted that interior design would be the focus area for online customers, but it quickly became apparent that there was more interest in furniture, says Philip.
- Today, furniture sales make up more than 70% of online store sales. However, sales would never have gone so well if there were no physical stores, and our omnichannel strategy is, therefore, critical to us. In fact, both our online and offline stores complement each other. We also saw that we sell significantly better online in areas where we have physical stores, says Philip.
The road ahead
In the future, we have both short and long-term development plans for the Home & Cottage e-commerce. In the short term, we will optimize it to make sure everything is smooth, while in the longer term, we will continue to develop the content work, says Philip.
- We work continuously to ensure that the website’s appearance harmonizes with our other marketing efforts – both digitally and physically so that everything is connected.
Therefore, the website must be easy to manage and make changes, which, in turn, provides a smoother shopping experience. Philip concludes the present platform is reliable, stable, and offers great security and safety for e-commerce transactions.