Crafting SLV's digital future

Headquarters: Übach-Palenberg, Germany
Technology stack: Spryker, Vue.js, Akeneo, Typescript, REST API

SLV (opens in a new window) is one of the leading lighting suppliers for B2B sales in Germany, specializing in illumination solutions. Their clients include but are not limited to electricians, lighting partners, and architects. The company decided to collaborate with best it (opens in a new window) to relaunch their webshop. Using Storyblok, the agency prepared SLV for their digital future. The agency incorporated a B2B sales solution and connected it to Akeneo (PIM), which streamlined SLV’s online sales architecture. The new eCommerce platform won the Shop Usability Award (opens in a new window) in the category of best B2B shop and delivered outstanding results, achieving a high 92 Lighthouse Score on best practices, 93 on SEO ratio, and 84 on page accessibility.

Data integration challenges

SLV faced the challenge of merging and integrating a large number of interfaces. Additionally, the navigation structure of the shop had to be compatible with PIM. Finally, SLV's teams had to manage content simultaneously due to increased globalization. These challenges required a simple and easy-to-use CMS.

In a nutshell, these were the project's objectives:

• Creating a modern platform that would give SLV a fresh aesthetic. For the company, it was important to express its unique spirit.
• Improving usability for the B2B target group to enhance utility for SLV's audience.
• Customized pricing information based on the customer's preferences and needs.
• Separating product catalogs for each country that cater to the local markets' regulations.
• Ensuring the platform's high performance to leverage its potential. The step was essential to guarantee customer retention.
• Integration of external systems such as CMS, PIM, and more.
• Optimization of mobile shop usability to improve user experience and functionality.

Preparing for the future

best it, having experience with Storyblok, immediately suggested the CMS to face SLV's challenges:

• Storyblok's easy-to-use UX and workflows made content management simple for SLV.
• With Storyblok, each team could create content on their own. At the same time, the website remained consistent across all departments.
• SLV's team leveraged Storyblok's reusable blocks and the Visual Editor. These features made content creation enjoyable and efficient.
• Storyblok enabled SLV's marketing team to own specific roles and permissions (opens in a new window). Another benefit was that they could schedule content publishing. These streamlined content management workflows. At the same time, SLV benefited from cross-team collaboration.
• With Storyblok, the company could leverage their multi-platform capabilities and omnichannel publishing. With the CMS, SLV could handle localization for 14 languages.
• The new shop system was well prepared for the expansion. SLV could serve more markets abroad and handle more orders and deliveries.

How Storyblok transformed SLV

SLV's system has many parts that work well together. They use Akeneo for product information and TESSA for digital assets. The solutions share the same database and are compatible with Storyblok. This lets SLV's branches change and publish text as they need. At the same time, the content remains consistent. It's vital since SLV has 13 websites for different countries.

The project took roughly over four months. Now, 15 people from marketing and digital teams use Storyblok. Additionally, 8 users from the company's subsidiaries are active in the project. What's important is that the content types are the same for all editors.

Storyblok - the perfect CMS for SLV’s B2B expansion

The SLV project resulted in efficiency and data security improvements. Storyblok provided SLV with the needed efficiency and future-proof technologies. The company's new system is now functional and ready for the future. With the help of Storyblok, the SLV team and its subsidiaries can now manage content with ease and peace of mind.