stilwerk used to be a place where high end interior design brands like Vitra, B&B Italia, Cassina, Walter Knoll, Molteni, Kartell, Horgen Glarus, USM and others only presented their products in a unique design environment in the stilwerk destinations in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Dortmund and Berlin.
The digital furniture and interior design market is known to be a challenging market regarding digital commerce due to its high priced products and 8-12 weeks delivery times.
Therefore the brands itself try to target digital directly and in addition some online only retailers with a legacy right from start of digital furniture retail.
Anyhow business of stilwerk was to rent out retail space to brands and retailers in the interior design area.
digital pressure to brick´n´mortar
But as digital pressure to existing brick ´n´ mortar retailbusiness rises brands see one traditional retailer after the other disappear from the market and no new young rising stars appear only Samwer style the winner takes it all mentality online only models rise with deep impact on the traditional value chain. These models try to not only take on retail margin, they are targeting the product margin also with own designed (often copied) and produced products.
So stilwerk as the destination for design and partner for high premium brands needed to establish a digital roadmap.
asset analysis and strategic roadmap
Computer Rock was asked to first analyze existing digital assets and then perform a strategic plan to answer the essential question by interior design industry for stilwerk
This being a quite unusual task for company focusing on digital commerce and services shows the integral part digital plays nowadays with borders melting between real and online world.
So we are responsible to establish the omnichannel experience for potential clients of stilwerk, setting up the stilwerk digital eco system.
digital assessment and analytics in the real world
Thus also made us become a Cisco Meraki Partner to digitalize the stilwerk locations and establish visitor counts and movement heatmaps within the stilwerk destinations.
Running the digital infrastructure within the locations is a strategic goal and a plus for the whole stilwerk system.
journey begins autumn 2016
starting in autumn 2016 with the relaunch of the consumer facing website of all stilwerk destinations the strategic goals are operationalized with the first digital asset targeting the CRM of the stilwerk system including tracking within the locations beginning of 2017 the ecommerce integration into consumer facing website will start to be the destination for design online and offline.