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VillaVerde, part of the Sevea Group, is France’s leading network of independent garden centers.
The retailer operates a network of more than 70 garden centers across France. It offers a wide selection of products in three categories with radically different constraints: gardening, home decor and pet supplies.
Until then handled exclusively through physical stores, product distribution changed in 2014, when VillaVerde decided to move into e-commerce by launching its own online sales platform. It was a major challenge for the garden center chain, which had to undertake its digital transformation and master an entirely new business.
And because VillaVerde wanted to bring its “local retailer” positioning online, it would launch not 1 but 70 online stores, each with its own catalog designed around the specific characteristics and buying habits of its region.
Synolia, a PIM agency, takes you behind the scenes of the project…
For VillaVerde, entering e-commerce meant above all adopting new tools and setting up new processes. A Magento Enterprise platform hosts the 70 stores, which are connected to the Akeneo Product Information Management (PIM) solution. Natively connected to Magento, Akeneo lets the team manage the publication of all its product data, from creation to distribution across channels, online and offline.
One of the e-commerce team’s first challenges was to design and build a product catalog from scratch to structure the database that would feed the 70 future online stores, all within a few months.To tackle this, VillaVerde selected Akeneo, the French open source PIM solution, championed by its long-standing partner Synolia. Intuitive and easy to use, the solution emerged as the ideal choice for VillaVerde.
“We had to support our teams as they adopted new methods tied to our move into e-commerce. Working with a tool dedicated to building and enriching our catalog products was a real asset in our change management.”
Convinced that Akeneo was the right tool, VillaVerde joined the Early Adopter program, becoming one of the application’s very first users. This early adoption allowed the team to see the application grow richer with each new release.
The team planned to collect data on more than 25,000 SKUs from suppliers, centralize it in the application and enrich it before publishing it to the online stores: often heterogeneous data, coming from multiple suppliers and intended for a wide range of categories.Within 6 months, not 25,000 but more than 42,000 products were available for sale online!
“We got to grips with this new tool very quickly: a few hours of hands-on use were enough for us to become autonomous. The well-designed ergonomics and clever widgets helped us exceed our targets and build a deeper catalog in less time than originally planned.”
Today, Akeneo plays a central role in the e-commerce setup. The team benefits in many ways. Managing the catalog in Akeneo, with its single interface, saves significant time in day-to-day catalog management. New SKUs are created and updated quickly and easily, significantly reducing time to market. “Synolia was able to recommend the right tools to support our move into online retail and design a high-performing, flexible ecosystem for our entire network.”
“Synolia was able to recommend the right tools to support our move into online retail and design a high-performing, flexible ecosystem for our entire network.”
The VillaVerde team isn’t stopping there. It plans to leverage the cross-channel features of the Akeneo solution to distribute data to other channels. The retailer wants to feed the interactive kiosks in its stores so shoppers can browse an always up-to-date catalog. The marketing division will also use the Pim2Catalog connector with Adobe InDesign to feed product data into the print catalogs.
Beyond e-commerce, Akeneo is becoming the data centralization tool within the IT system, the cornerstone that will enable VillaVerde to launch and grow its cross-channel strategy.
"Working with Akeneo allowed us to see our e-commerce site as one part of a much larger system for marketing our products, and to roll out our cross-channel strategy faster"
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