Rosendahl Design Icons.

2020 brought big changes for Rosendahl Design Group, including a new brand- and marketing strategy, which meant that all of RDG’s nine brands should be comprised under one main brand – Rosendahl Design Icons.

Obviously, this strategy also meant a radical change concerning the existing commerce platform where we were about to roll out independent and separate commerce universes for all nine brands, consolidated in the same technical platform.

In order to not miss out on Rosendahl’s biggest peaks – Black Friday and the Christmas sales – we had to figure out a way to implement the new strategy in the existing platform in record time. We had 10 weeks to do it.

Thanks to the radical shift in tech-strategy we undertook just a year earlier when we launched the current commerce platform, we had an ideal situation to complete the necessary changes. The new tech-strategy meant that we had shifted away from a full suite marketing-platform-mindset to a best-of-breed strategy, where the solution was connected by several small 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. “Segment” is utilized as a datahub between other third-part systems like e-mail systems, Analytics in GA, and segmentation and personalization tools. We have developed essential business integrations for internal systems through an API-layer that exchanges data between RDG’s PIM-system and ERP-system.

We decided to stick to the existing tech stack and Dept Agency was introduced to the team as the UX/design partner to work out needed design changes to integrate the new Umbrella brand “Rosendahl Design Icons” in the solution.

Thanks to our headless system-architecture we succeeded in completing all changes in just the 10 weeks that we had available. Additionally, we implemented several new functions such as Hello Retail as the product recommendations engine, Shopping Image to increase the user experience, and ApsisOne as the marketing platform. The solution is a PaaS-solution fully cloud-enabled in Azure.

Both technically and financially, this platform is enormously cost-effective, as we, unlike a full suite marketing solution, only develop and pay for the systems and modules we need at the given time. Thanks to a simple 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 new multi-brand platform provides many new business opportunities to work with e.g. bundles, upsell, cross-sell, shared pricing, as well as marketing activities such as PPC and SEO.