Rosendahl Design Group.

All of RDG’s nine brands have been added to the portfolio over time through several M&A’s. This has left a technical setup, where the different brands were spread across different technical commerce- and web platforms. Besides high licenses for redundant systems, RDG’s web- and commerce-teams experienced their systems being slow to work with, both concerning data handling, content, and commerce workflows. New development often meant high costs and long development time.

We ended out with a consolidated multi-brand commerce-platform, rolled out internationally in all RDG’s markets. The goal is to offer all RDG’s customers an inspiring digital branded buying experience, unique for each brand, but founded in the same technical platform. The benefits of this solution are obvious. The shared technical platform and governance setup provides lower costs, more adaption, and a faster time-to-market – without compromising each brand’s unique identity.

The new platform marks a decisive change in tech-strategy, away from a full suite marketing-platform-mindset and over to a best-of-breed strategy, where the solution is connected by several smaller special systems in an open, loosely coupled, and API-based architecture.

The tech stack consists of Umbraco as CMS and Ucommerce as the commerce engine, along with Uccelerate as the online storefront. Segment gathers all user data from all digital touchpoints and is used as an event HUB between other third-party systems like e-mail systems, Analytics in GA, and segmentation- and personalization tools. We have developed crucial integrations to a wide range of 3. party systems through a consolidated API-layer that exchanges data between RDG’s PIM-system and ERP-system. The solution is a PaaS solution, fully cloud enables in Azure.

Both technically and economically, this platform is enormously cost-effective, as we, unlike a full suite solution, only develop and pay for the systems and modules we need at the given time. Thanks to a loosely coupled architecture based on APIs, we can develop and deploy optimizations and changes with much shorter development time and lower costs than with more traditional systems. The solution probably offers the market's most user-friendly administration and editor interface without compromising all the functionalities that a modern experience and commerce system must be able to have today.

RDG’s new digital platform is the result of a successful collaboration between our team of specialists, Spring/Summer as a design partner, and not least RDG’s own digital team. The process has been WaterScrumFall – a mixture of a more traditional waterfall approach at the beginning during the clarification phase, a truly agile development phase, and finally a more rigorous and linear test and launch phase. Kruso has contributed with strategy and tech advisors as well as a full development team to the entire solution. From start to launch only took 10 weeks.