E-Commerce

A brilliant e-commerce experience for B2B customers

This is how we opened up B2B e-commerce for the world-renowned jewelry manufacturer

Despite a strong brand presence in the world's elegant shopping streets and department stores, sales to other companies represent an indispensable mainstay for medium-sized Austrian companies. Together, Etribes and Swarovski have developed the product vision, a design prototype and an implementation roadmap for a completely new and customer-focused B2B platform. This is where business customers such as designers, creative managers and product developers from all over the world can find out about the high-quality crystals and purchase them for their individual needs.

Make thousands of crystals digitally tangible

It's the year 2013: Swarovski's B2B range already includes more than 16,000 individual products related to crystal, cut, colored glass. These should be presented to existing and new customers in the most appealing, personalized and efficient way possible. Meanwhile, competitive pressure is increasing due to increasing competition from favourable Asian markets. As a result, Etribes is being brought in as a digitization partner in order to consolidate the already roughly defined target image for its own digital customer engagement platform and to ensure direct digital access to B2B customers as competition increases.

Meet customer requirements
The digital customer journey of business customers within the luxury sector has changed significantly in recent years. They expect personalized services and collaborative features, including in digital solutions, in order to be able to meet their individual needs. Swarovski has recognized the resulting potential and has gained additional support in the digital sector with Etribes.
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Incubate digital thinking
It became clear to management that the organization lacked understanding of the digital customer journey in this important B2B business. It also recognized the need to simplify structures that have evolved over time and to create a single digital access for B2B partners. But for this, the manufacturer from Tyrol needed support in terms of resources, skills and know-how.
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Expanding market leadership
With the new B2B e-commerce platform, Swarovski wants to lay the foundation for defending international market leadership and overcoming future digital challenges. Etribes then mobilized a team of consultants, experts and entrepreneurs, as well as tech practitioners, to further develop the B2B customer journey and clearly differentiate itself from the competition.
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Be inspired by Swarovski's success story
and start your own path to digital success

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Digital transformation takes a really long time. For us, it was all about speed and efficiency in order to outstrip new competitors. And then Etribes was the big change for us.

Roland Harste

From product vision to recruiting tech talent

Develop a product vision

The development of the new customer engagement platform is based on Swarovski's strategic goals, stakeholder interests and the needs of the target group. The platform promises a unique customer experience that has not yet been available in the competition. The product vision is implemented through a customer-focused B2B platform, which serves as the basis for all customer activities. The first version focuses on transactional functions, while customer inspiration and collaboration will play an even greater role in the medium and long term.

Implement design prototypes

The product vision was visualized as a design prototype early in the conception phase using UX concepts. This enabled rapid progress in joint project management and makes the product tangible for all teams involved throughout the development process.

Define game plan

The game plan serves as a roadmap for implementing the product vision and defines all mission-critical framework conditions and work processes that are necessary to develop and implement the new B2B e-commerce platform. In this project step, the creation of a digital tech hub away from the headquarters was also announced, which opened in May 2019.

Build a tech hub

We recommend that Swarovski establish a tech hub separate from the core organization. In other words, to form an independent team that tackles digital projects quickly, effectively and independently — and at the same time can benefit from the capital and resources of the parent company. In this context, we helped Swarovski recruit top tech profiles and recruited numerous digital talents from our Etribes Entrepreneur & Expert Network.