SWAROVSKI OPTIK eyes the future of localized ecommerce at scale

After 72 years in business, SWAROVSKI OPTIK is no stranger to change. The hunting, birding and outdoor supplies brand has spent decades innovating in the field, making their customers' hobbies more enjoyable through the production of long-range optical products.
After undergoing a rapid digital growth spurt, the family-run company realized their digital experience had become increasingly fragmented between regions, product segments, storefronts, and even content types. This created a clunky digital experience for the buyer and created inconsistencies across the growing number of languages and regions.

As with many rapidly growing ecommerce brands, the speed and cost of launching new features and channels across sites and segments had simply become unmanageable. Furthermore, failure to successfully integrate with critical third-party enterprise software from the parent business group further limited their ability to adapt to changing business needs. It was time to evolve or be left behind.

SWAROVSKI OPTIK teamed up with Contentful solutions partner Bright IT to transition from a legacy monolithic CMS to one that was flexible, customizable, and most of all, performant. Contentful’s API-first content platform was a natural fit to power the site, ensuring it would be future-proof and adaptable for years to come.  

With the shift to Contentful, SWAROVSKI OPTIK was able to overcome several key business challenges related to localization, flexibility and operational efficiency. Here are just a few of the benefits the team has enjoyed since launch.

Improved localization and translation capabilities

Since migrating to Contentful, SWAROVSKI OPTIK ’s editorial team is no longer faced with the burden of rewriting content for each language and dialect. With Contentful, they can implement localization on both field and entry levels, allowing editors to reuse translated content across locales. Even better — they still have flexibility to customize where needed. 

“For us, it was important to be able to reuse content wherever necessary, [since] there are a number of English website versions. We wanted to reuse most of the content across these, but we also wanted to maintain flexibility to adjust specific content to a locale. This applies not just to British or American English, but extends to dialects like Netherlands English, for example.” 

–Klaus Unterkircher, CEO, Bright IT

On top of this, SWAROVSKI OPTIK leveraged one of Contentful’s many third-party translation integrations, reducing manual lift of translation and improving collaboration with their local translation partners. With an API-first content platform like Contentful, SWAROVSKI OPTIK will be able to continuously optimize website content and transactional ecommerce pages as they expand into new locales and dialects.  

Lighting-fast delivery of digital content

To address site performance, the solutions team partnered with leading B2C and B2B ecommerce platform commercetools to deliver a lightning-fast storefront experience. At the same time, Contentful’s commercetools app integration enabled customers to navigate seamlessly between marketing content and product pages without lag. SWAROVSKI OPTIK refers to this outcome as “the seamless integration of content and commerce.” 

“On the old platform…content and commerce were two different things. We had a shop, we had a blog, the classic setup. We really wanted to merge these things together – they should always be in the mix. No matter where you are in the customer journey, you should always be faced with the option of buying, but also understanding what the products mean, what feeling they can give to you, what experiences you could have with this product.” 

- Hans Nillson, ecommerce and digital platform manager, SWAROVSKI OPTIK

Last but not least, a React framework facilitated best practices for site performance, including delivering ready-HTML to the client’s browser and reducing file size to help maintain quality of media. For an ecommerce brand, a high-performing site can help keep users focused on purchasing instead of bouncing.  

Streamlined workflows and increased editorial productivity

It turned out that speed wasn’t just an issue for website customers, but for SWAROVSKI OPTIK’s content and editorial teams as well. Contentful’s modular content structure helped lower the number of possible combinations of text and images onsite, reducing legwork for editors. Fewer content combinations also freed up more opportunities for optimization and testing. 

To complement the built-in features and integrations, SWAROVSKI OPTIK has also developed not one, but two Contentful integrations to help editorial teams collaborate more directly and find content more easily. The endless potential for evolution and adaptation is just one of the many benefits of an API-first cloud-based content solution like Contentful.

These are just a few ways in which SWAROVSKI OPTIK was able to improve its editorial operations. Check out the full case study for more details on the custom integrations and results of the launch. 

Contentful worked for SWAROVSKI OPTIK. Can it work for you?

Contentful is proud to work with leading brands and partners across the globe, helping to deliver excellent digital customer experiences at scale. Learn more about our global marketing and localization use cases or check out some of our other customer success stories to see how Contentful can support your brand’s digital transformation. 

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