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How Bang & Olufsen Rebuilt Ecommerce for a 100-Year Brand · Honest Ecommerce

• speaker-0: It's not me versus as like consultant versus you know, brand. It's like what the North Star is your customer. What is the best for them? And this is probably the best for them. So how do we give them the best experience? And then when the they shift that it becomes a lot less contentious and a lot less, you know, weird. It's just like, ⁓ yeah, you're right. Let's how do we give our customer the best experience? Because if that is what you do, everything else will follow and it'll just be better for everybody. speaker-1: It's really all about making every step of ⁓ of the journey the ⁓ the most seamless and and ⁓ luxurious and and beautiful ⁓ for for a customer and wherever they end up buying, doesn't really matter, you know. speaker-0: Honesty Commerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today. Honesty Commerce is proudly produced by Electric Eye, a Shopify Plus partner helping e-commerce brands sell more with strategic design and development. Visit electriqueye.io for more information. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest E-Commerce. Today I'm welcoming the show. A senior e-commerce experience and performance manager at Bang and Olafsen. They're a Danish luxury audio brand where Scandinavian design meets high fidelity sound. Julia has been in this industry with over a decade of experience, international experience at brands like Adidas, Escada, and BO. She's built her career at the intersection of digital innovation and brand storytelling. Julia, welcome to the show. speaker-1: Hello, hello, happy to be here. speaker-0: Absolutely. I'm very excited to chat. This is a long time coming. ⁓ thousands of miles. ⁓ we met at Shop Talk in Barcelona. ⁓ and then there was a tornado in my neighborhood that got rid of my power when we were supposed to originally do this, but now we're here, now we're doing it. I'm so excited to chat. speaker-1: Yes, me too, and I'm in Copenhagen now, so still pretty far. speaker-0: Absolutely, absolutely. So for those that are unaware of ⁓ Bang and Olifton, can you just quickly talk about ⁓ I guess the types of products they're bringing to the market currently, but maybe a bit about the history of the brand. speaker-1: Yeah, the brand is actually a hundred years old, a hundred and one soon. ⁓ so it's been around ⁓ forever. It's been ⁓ founded ⁓ in a very little village in ⁓ in the north of Denmark, ⁓ which has a very difficult name to pronounce for anyone else who's not Danish. So I'm not even gonna attempt ⁓ to do that. And ⁓ they started by making batteries and radios and then kind of like expanding their range around TVs and lately ⁓ we've been doing more ⁓ wearables as well, like headphones and ⁓ small speaker that you can carry around. There's a long history around ⁓ record ⁓ player as well and ⁓ there is a famous ⁓ CD player, for example, like this kind of tower with five CDs that has been featured in some like iconic movies. and even in the David Wes Prada, we are mentioned for our telephone, actually. So it's it's a pretty iconic brand and that cares a lot about design and craftsmanship, but at the same time is bringing ⁓ technology and ⁓ and and sound and vision always to an incredible level of quality and one of our mission is really to make sure that when you experience music with our product is ⁓ reproduced as the artist first intended. So it's a very pure experience of listening to your favorite music and that's why I love using the product actually every day. So yeah. speaker-0: Absolutely. And and any sort of audiophiles out there, anyone that likes, you know, listening to records, it is a it is a brand that comes up often in those circles. ⁓ it it's a great, fantastic brand. Now, you mentioned 101 years old this year and this show we're talking about selling things online a lot of the times, you know, honesty commerce. ⁓ so d what was the game plan before you joined the team? How were they approaching e-commerce and then what shifted as you joined the team and as you started to ⁓ dive in and tackle some of these problems for them. speaker-1: Yes, I actually joined right in the moment when the whole company went through a big digital transformation. I'm gonna use this word. I'm sorry. ⁓ my I'm sorry, I saw your expression when I was mentioning it and I was like, yes, that happened. and they used to have like a very kind of scattered experience online. There was a site for that was ⁓ speaker-0: Favorite word. speaker-1: Just basically a digital showroom for like those big products, like the big TVs and speakers and installation. And then there was an e-com side for like the smaller wearables and portable speaker. They were two different brands, but the equity was kind of lost, the brand identity and value was diluted, and The team at the time decided, okay, we need to revolutionize this. We are lagging behind. We need to bring everything under the Banginolosen brand and create a full new digital experience that is ⁓ up to standard. And ⁓ that's exactly the moment when I joined. ⁓ it was a very small team, we were like six people or five, something like that. And There was this kind of like almost like a founder startup vibe in ⁓ in the digital team. We're very few people, international coming from all over the world from with different experiences and and part of life. And we were kind of given a bit of a carte blanche as like, okay, go build. This is the mission. We need to have a new e-commerce setup. it needs to be under one brand, it needs to be luxurious and ⁓ and immersive and but still make a lot of money. And ⁓ that was that was the mission and ⁓ we work ⁓ really hard on it. it was really, really this kind of like okay let's just make our own rule, let's just make it happen. And to have this type of opportunity I think inside Such an established and heritage brand was a really fun challenge. And for the first couple of years that was really okay, let's figure out things as we're doing them, so to speak. And and we started to get a bigger team, we started to get ⁓ more revenues, we started to have a more stable setup, and that's when we kind of like moved into something that is like a bit more of an established ⁓ e com business, so to speak. And and that's ⁓ when also we started to understand that yes for us e com is ⁓ is definitely a a growth ⁓ opportunity and ⁓ but at the same time it's also a very very important consideration channel for for a new customer and for acquiring new clients that is for I think we have ⁓ recent data that confirm that ⁓ 68% of new clients have their first interaction with the brands on our recon site. And whether they purchase there, they go to a store, they go to a I don't know third party retailer, whatever it is The e-commerce site is the place where they experience the brand for the first time. So we have this kind of like important double duty of like making sure that we are ⁓ very efficient and easy to use, is to navigate e-commerce side, but that also tell the history that ⁓ the brand has and ⁓ all the craftsmanship, all the attention to details and features that our very precious products have, but at the same time is also a vehicle that kind of like can guide you into the next step ⁓ of your weather consideration journey, purchase journey that might bring you to a different place, it might bring you to a store to have the full kind of like live experience of what it is to listen to music through our products. speaker-0: What is the next big idea that could change your business? A pricing change? A new bundling strategy? Adding subscriptions? Tweaking your shipping offer? Most brands make these decisions based on gut feel. They roll out the change, hope for the best, and have no real idea if it helped or hurt their business. IntelliGems fixes that. 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That's intelligims.io slash audit. Intelligems.io slash audit. They were going through this digital transformation. You were joining the team. How long did it? I mean, how long did it go from having these two ⁓ disparate, these two separate experiences to having a a a rebuilt singular experience to where you know you've you've joined the modern age of brands where you're selling online. ⁓ like what did that what did that timeline look like? Not to where you guys think you were doing good at it, that you just got to phase one of we can now sell online and we have a singular experience. How long was that like roadmap? speaker-1: I mean, I guess in total it took almost a couple of years, I would say. it was yes, okay, we have a website, we can sell products, but then like how do we structure our SEO? Back in the days it was just SEO, right? how do we structure our data? How do we kind of ⁓ also change people's mind inside the company first on how yeah you know like what is our role. before it was just like okay we can just push a very small communication and amount of product on this website and all the rest the store will take care of it. But like how do we kind of insert ourselves in the communication journey, in the purchase journey, in the consideration journey of our customers, and making sure that we kind of like strike that balance between yes, we are here to sell, but also we are here to support the retail network. And that was that was a process, I would say, that is probably still going on because those like having the technical setup ⁓ up and running it's not the most complicated things. There is a lot of you know company that can help you to do that pretty efficiently. And sometimes the most difficult part is really to change the way you work ⁓ with other teams, the way that ⁓ a lot of People that have been working in this company for a really long time or that own a store in wherever countries around the world that that have felt that they were kind of like the owner of the brand in that specific place. And that suddenly they see that there is someone else in ⁓ in the game, right? And ⁓ it might look like ⁓ a competitor because it's ⁓ really efficient in selling some. products to customer all around the world and ⁓ how do we balance that? How do we come to terms with that? And yeah, also how the marketing ⁓ channel ⁓ started working differently and how do we build a CRM? How do we build that ⁓ whole customer relationship now that there is this new player that ⁓ can do a lot of things and pretty efficiently, you know? So The better we were becoming at doing e commerce and ⁓ presenting the stories of the brand and ⁓ getting new customer in the into the brand, in ⁓ getting more signups, getting more ⁓ revenues, that started to become actually a bit of a point of discussion. It is like, so what ⁓ what's what's next? What are they gonna do? You know, like ⁓ yeah. So that's something we're still working through, I would say. speaker-0: Most brands outgrow their legacy choices long before they switch. Bad platform decisions do not fail all at once. They fail slowly, then suddenly. First, it is one workaround, then another tool, then another integration that is duct taped on top, and eventually your team is spending more time managing the stack than actually marketing to customers. Eventually, rebuilding is less painful than staying, usually when it starts to show up on the PL. That's when scaling brands simplify and standardize on Clavio. Clavio is the AI first B2C CRM. 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It is built for online businesses just like yours, and it is built for where e-commerce is going, not where it was five years ago. If you're running email and SMS across multiple tools, or you're on a legacy platform and thinking about your next phase of growth, it's probably time to look at Clavio. Go to Clavio.com slash honest and see why hundreds of thousands of brands have already made the switch. That's Clavio.com slash honest. K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com slash H-O-N-E-S T. I can only imagine w even with with brands with even, you know, a fifth of the tenure and history of of what you have there, ⁓ there's just so many legacy systems and processes or jobs, even that exist to solve a specific thing that thinking about it now with how technology works, it's like, This can be happen lot more streamlined and a lot more simple. And just because it's simple, more streamlined, maybe arguably more profitable or better or better efficiency, the human element in that always gets a little there's a lot of friction there. And this isn't the first conversation that I've ever had around this, either on the podcast or through our consultancy. I ⁓ can think of this from last week with a more modern brand with a franchise model. Where the friction is not because they know the change is right. It's how to get everyone to basically not be mad about it. And so it's like those are the problems you have to solve for. It isn't a computer problem anymore. Shopify and all the other solutions out there have really made this stuff as easy as possible for some of the more straightforward stuff. ⁓ but it's getting that buy in from the rest of the team and and change people are scared of change at times. Yeah. speaker-1: Absolutely, absolutely. And for example, we just ⁓ starting ⁓ doing small pilots with our ⁓ own stores. So we have a big franchise business, but then we have a small group of stores that are actually owned directly by Banginolsen and ⁓ with them we started working on this pilot on appointment ⁓ booking. ⁓ so basically you go online, you select a product. We don't sell some of these really big, big, big products that ⁓ need specific installation and things like that. For example, if you wanna buy a TV and ⁓ and then basically what we were offering before it was just kind of, yeah, you can send an email to a store and see what happens. But of course That is kind of like a broken experience. We never had ⁓ like data on okay, what happens after. And so we started partnering with a French company that actually provides this ⁓ service for appointment booking. So directly from from the econ site, you can select the store you wanna go and select your time slot, the service you're looking for. It could be in like consultancy for like installation or like a product demonstration. It could be also service or repair or something like that. And and then you easily book your appointment, everything is confirmed online. And when the day comes that you as a customer have ⁓ have booked your slot, just go into the store, everything is ready set up for you and it's just ⁓ easy, frictionless, beautiful. Luxurious experience that a lot of luxury brand offers for their atelier or things like that. And even doing something like that, that finally kind of like is bringing this omnichannel ⁓ journey wish dream that we've always had to life, it's really taking a lot of Time and kind of like convincing and training and making sure that in the store they adopt this new way of working, that it's not like, ⁓ just someone coming in or you call like this customer that you've known for a long time, but this is a new way to communicate with our customer to have to build those relationships and those experiences and And now we've seen like that the stores that really adopted ⁓ this new way of working into their daily life, they're loving it. Right? They're having their sales have improved every time that you get into that you get someone into one of our like especially this most beautiful kind of ⁓ stores in the beautiful location of whatever Mayfair or ⁓ Soho in ⁓ in New York or things like that. Like a customer that really experienced those products. it's an easier customer to convince to not buy one, but maybe two or three and install them in your whole house. And of course that's ⁓ and and and really the stores that that that have adopted this, they've seen really positive results. They love using the tool. They use it ⁓ to communicate with customers, to ask them for their if they have this some ⁓ special requests like would you like to listen to a special song when you or watch a special movie or something like that is just making the experience so much more interactive and and exciting, both for the customer but also for the store. So that's you know they can prepare and they know how to ⁓ actually activate ⁓ the The experience and but yeah, even this that seems like a of course it needs to be like that, right? It's such an easy solution. it took really a long time to make sure that it was understood, but ⁓ by the whole team, like the retail team, even IT, to get them to support like the structure of it. CRM to get involved. Like these are customers that we need to involve and and and make part of our customer base and ⁓ and building those relationships, those clientele like ⁓ setup after that. It's yeah, it's ⁓ it's been great and you can see really positive results, but in order to get there, it was A long process and still we need to expand it to the rest of the retail networks, all those franchise ⁓ businesses that are even more reluctant often to, you know, collaborate with HQ. So yeah, it's gonna be ⁓ an interesting challenge for the year, I think. speaker-0: You have prepped all year and all that hard work is paying off. Your store is converting, the ads are working, and this is shaping up to be your best holiday season. But your 3PL can't keep up. 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For the ones that have it, ⁓ I mean, I'm I'm sure that you guys are you have all the data now because it's trackable. ⁓ and you can show you can show kind of what this is doing, not only to improve the customer experience, but the other KPIs that I think. you know, potentially franchisees might care a little bit more about. So, you know, they they might they might get a little bit more interested in in hearing that stuff sooner rather than later. But again, it all goes back to and this is the North Star that I always I find myself when I'm ever n s like not negotiating, I guess, but just like talking about like bigger process changes with with brands that have been doing things a certain way. And I'm like, hey, like, it's not me ⁓ it's not me versus you as like consultant versus, you know, brand. It's like what the North Star is your customer, what is the best for them? And this is probably the best for them. So how do we give them the best experience? And then when the they shift that it becomes a lot less contentious and a lot less, you know, weird. It's just like, ⁓ yeah, you're right. Let's how do we give our customer the best experience? Because if that is what you do, everything else will follow and it'll just be better for everybody. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. And ⁓ it's really like like our biggest mission as as ⁓ for for a website is really to making sure that every ⁓ different ⁓ intent and every different customer need is ⁓ is met at the right time with the right communication and ⁓ if they wanna keep ⁓ their journey online and Go until you know checkout and and and post purchase, get their products, get this beautiful gift box in their home and open it up and have this wow ⁓ moments ⁓ with something that they bought online. Or you know, if it is about ⁓ making sure that ⁓ we take them in on the right journey to to get in touch with the store ⁓ that is the nearest to them, then great. But It's really all about making every step of ⁓ of the journey the ⁓ the most ⁓ seamless and and ⁓ luxurious and and beautiful ⁓ for for a customer and wherever they end up buying, doesn't really matter, you know. speaker-0: Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview. A quick pivot, because this I found interesting as we were kind of researching this show was with a brand that's got a hundred years of history, there is so much information out there about you. And obviously the buzzwords at the conference that we met at, even, you know, AI is ⁓ so big. AEO, you know, agenic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. How are you guys how are you guys dealing with ⁓ large language models and optimizing for for AI for a brand with just so much information out there about yourself? speaker-1: Yeah, that's the topic. That's the one we're all talking about. That is taking a lot of ⁓ of our time and it's interesting. Like we started ⁓ this ⁓ AI search ⁓ journey. I'm gonna say journey again. That's another buzzword. I know. I know what can I do? It's it is what it is. You know, in the last few months and what we're tracking now, it's looking pretty promising when of course we focus on our niche and the personas and the customer that we know are searching for us. So when we look at that, mention, citation, whatever it is, sentiment, very positive, ⁓ we're seeing really, really good results. But I think when it gets like harder is about when we're talking about these intangible things. Like of course what we sell are are physical products, but our main like core ⁓ product is actually sound, which is really, really hard to quantify. And it's especially digitally, right? And so therefore like everything that is around that or whether it's about like the craftsmanship, the details, the taste, you know, about design and beauty, like this is these are very ephemeral kind of topics that ⁓ AI doesn't per se probably grab onto, right? speaker-0: Yeah. I AI has no ta A AI has no taste. speaker-1: Not yet. Not yet. I don't know. No, I doubt. But so that's that's something that that that that worries us a bit, right? Because it's not really whatever, you know, whether we show up or not, but it's kind of like how those answer kind of flatters when w when it hasn't, so to speak. You know, like if you use an AI overview and it's like That's some speaker under a hundred dollars, whatever. yeah, this this is hard for us. Like that's not ⁓ probably the the place where we're gonna shine. and and it's kind of like yeah, this idea of AI is kind of flattening everything ⁓ down to just ⁓ very specific ⁓ criteria. so so we're monitoring, we are we're looking at and and of course we know that things keep on evolving, keep on changing, and we're monitoring and we're trying to find out, of course, like how do we make sure that from a technical point of view all our data and all our content is structured correctly so that At least it gets ⁓ a chance to be ⁓ found and read by LMs. we're working a lot, ⁓ we've been working a lot in the last few months on our schemas, on our headings, on our content structure, on kind of adding more QAs, ⁓ this type of FAQ contents into our pages so that we cover our basis, so to speak, for for this type of ⁓ of content and but at the same time we looked ⁓ at the fact that okay if ⁓ we all the search that ⁓ used to base used to be based on keywords and ⁓ is now kind of shifting away from that and often the placement that ⁓ we couldn't reach because we didn't have the ⁓ purchasing power that some other brands have to get a position at the right place. Maybe we can find a way to actually like insert ourselves in different types of conversation that customers are having with AI. I think there is some interesting like opportunity there. because kind of like traditional search kept us a little bit kind of boxed into our categories. Best speaker, best luxury speaker, ANC headphones and ⁓ things like that. But now that AI is responding to more broader ⁓ human questions, like these are prompts I've seen where we were mention ⁓ lately which are kind of like What can I buy for my dad who is turning 60 and love music and design? Or how do I I'm renovating my house? How do I make like my living room or like ⁓ my interior design more intentional and things like that? Or like how do I what are like the essential ⁓ Things I should buy if I want to look cool at the airport or something like that. So these are all new opportunities where our brands can be mentioned or can be kind of be part of the conversation in AI, ⁓ even if it's not completely related to a specific category of product that we sell. But it's completely aligned with the values and kind of like the intrinsic DNA of our brand and our product. So I think that's that's what kind of is exciting me about all the new possibility that AI offers us to kind of like, especially for a niche brand like ours that never used to have like the the money to kind of break through some of the ceilings. it could be really a way to reach new audiences that are kind of outside of our usual bubble and kind of like exploring new ways of ⁓ coming into ⁓ new clients' consideration in a different way. So it's really something that will require kind of like a lot of focus and kind of like really identifying what are these areas where we can make a difference and really work together with all our different departments, especially marketing, PR, social media, working with creators, work working with and experts and expert reviewers and things like that to make sure that we are present in a very s consistent way when it comes to addressing these specific topics that we weren't considering before because we were very focused on best luxury speakers, so to speak. So that is kind of like what is really exciting and ⁓ And can create ⁓ some fun opportunities I think for us in the future. speaker-0: Absolutely. And it's ⁓ so f yeah interesting, and and you're not the first person that I've heard say this is that a lot of this opportunity that people are seeing within like AI search for example, just the conversations people are having with these LLMs are very similar to like s just long tail keywords within the SEO landscape, you know, from ten or twenty years ago. and I guess just during this conversation, it it just made me realize that like nothing's really new anymore. It's like, all right, well the strategies that work to hit hit these like, you know, these long tail SEO keywords are probably just gonna crush it for people that are trying to hit these things within the, you know, and for AEO. ⁓ you know, there's just so many parallels between optimizing for SEO versus optimizing for AEO. So it's it's gonna be fun to watch how this all plays out. speaker-1: Yes, absolutely. And I mean, whenever I talk to people who are like really experts in the in in that area, it's like of course if you have like a strong SEO setup you'll be working on all these years, there's a lot of chances that you're gonna do well in in AO as well. so I think that's ⁓ There is definitely that hopefully like what we've been working on this last few years on the SEO side is gonna be kind of like a good foundation for how we kind of like expand ⁓ in terms of of topics and opportunity outside of of of the user bubble. And I think it's gonna be like interesting to also work with our marketing PR team, like in finding new ways and new kind of like ⁓ spaces where we can surface this disinformation. things that we have maybe left a little beh behind because it's not cool for luxury band brand to be on YouTube or whatever. We just need to be on Instagram and TikTok and whatever the hell. But ⁓ like What about working more with trustworthy, really strong creator on YouTube that talk about audio products, that talk about lifestyle ⁓ products and ⁓ and things like that? Like how can we find new opportunity, new channels that ⁓ can help support and ⁓ the narrative ⁓ around the the brand and And maintain that ⁓ freshness that ⁓ of course LLMs love as well, but ⁓ at the same time really consistency and and and hopefully a positive sentiment that ⁓ always. speaker-0: Julia, I have to be respectful of your time. ⁓ I can't thank you enough for coming on the show today and sharing all those amazing insights. ⁓ if anyone wants to find you online or or learn more about the brand, where should they go? What should they do? Well speaker-1: Well, ⁓ banginolisin.com. You can find us everywhere. We ship ⁓ if you wanna ⁓ kind of like get actually our products and experience them in real life. we ship mostly all over the world, I would say, in the northern hemisphere at least. And yes, ⁓ you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Giulia Miotti, and I think ⁓ that Yeah, that's all. But ⁓ that was really fun. speaker-0: Absolutely. Julia, thank you so much. speaker-1: Thanks for having me.