Bang & Olufsen have nurtured and refined their brand over 100 years of unique design heritage. But the richness of the brand wasn’t being championed digitally.

At the start of our pitch presentation in April 2018, Henrik Clausen, President and CEO of Bang & Olufsen, made the brief crystal clear:

“Our brand remains the foundation of the company… We have to find a way to unlock its value across the entire customer experience.”

Henrik’s words have stayed with us throughout an amazing, truly collaborative journey, culminating in the launch of www.bang-olufsen.com — combining strategy, creative, technology, data and agile delivery across multiple agency locations. We set out to build the Bang & Olufsen flagship store. And together, we’ve set a new benchmark in luxury commerce.

Our creative idea was driven by data. Through deep analytics across thousands of pages, we found that the longer customers stayed, the more likely they were to convert. We needed to keep our customers engaged for longer. The opposite of the ecommerce standard. So, we redefined the rules and carved our own category. We like to call it, Slow Commerce.

We’ve led conversion through immersive storytelling. By creating rich, interactive and engaging narratives, married with commerce. But it’s not just the stories we tell, it’s how we tell them — through the voice of the brand. Our shoppable stories are amplified through sound, mirrored by design, and as interactively intuitive as Bang & Olufsen products are themselves. We put the brand centre stage through every detail, with luxurious simplicity, connecting product and experience language with one clear voice. Allowing customers to find inspiration, followed by a direct path to purchase.

From day one, our strategy has been to unlock the ‘luxury delta’ that allows Bang & Olufsen to create lifestyle products of a luxury premium. As digital drives the luxury sector to pivot towards new audiences, new behaviours and new ways of operating, it was critical that we delivered a future-proof platform capable of scaling across the Bang & Olufsen ecosystem.

We identified our audience of Creative Curators and equipped them with the stories they wanted to share. Golden gems of information that only true insiders would know. We welcomed them in to our world of Bang & Olufsen. A new kind of luxury — one that’s inclusive, not exclusive.

Our immersive, data driven, flagship store integrates brand with commerce through storytelling that’s built for a global luxury audience — brought to consumers through modern, responsive engineering.

Ambitions were high, timelines were strict, and the budget was fixed. The odds seemed against us. But we delivered above and beyond with a team that spanned across five offices. Within 8 weeks from kick-off we had a working end-to-end prototype. Within 6 weeks, our immersive experience book was ready. And within 10 weeks, component led designs were completed and the entire online experience was launched — a day ahead of schedule.

Built on CommerceTools and Contentful CMS with a headless, microservices architecture, a first for the agency, we developed every feature following an API-led approach. We embraced modern engineering practices to build a platform that can be executed with agility across new audiences, new territories and new routes to market.

Unlocking value from launch: One week after launch our performance metrics are justifying all our efforts —

- Conversion +23%

- Revenue +42%

- Average Order Value +27%

People who view our shoppable stories:

• Are 80% more likely to add to basket

• View 70% more pages in a session

• View 3x more pages in a month

• Are twice as likely to ‘find a store’ after they’ve been to a story page