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Over the past 70 years, Lafuma Mobilier has established itself as the go-to specialist in outdoor furniture made in France, with a range of responsible, durable, and repairable products. After launching a first e-commerce platform on Magento 1 (already built by Synolia at the time), Lafuma Mobilier ran up against the limits of this aging solution. The e-commerce site needed a complete overhaul, and the French brand needed the right tools to offer its customers the smoothest, most efficient experience possible, while clearly showcasing what sets it apart. So, 10 years later, Lafuma Mobilier turned to Synolia once again to replatform its e-commerce site… and shift into high gear with Adobe Commerce Cloud!
A decade has passed since Lafuma Mobilier launched its e-commerce platform on Magento 1. Since then, Magento has evolved into Adobe Commerce, and a significant number of new versions have been released. At the same time, e-commerce practices and possibilities have kept changing and multiplying. By 2023, Magento 1 had become an outdated, aging solution, leaving Lafuma Mobilier with major technical issues and its teams with a loss of efficiency.
Synolia had already built Lafuma Mobilier’s first platform on Magento 1, as well as a project to digitalize the brand’s customer service with Zendesk that won both a Gold and a Bronze CX award. It was now entrusted with replatforming the French brand’s e-commerce site. A major challenge awaited Synolia and Lafuma Mobilier with this replatforming, which was not without risk: the site generates more than €10 million in annual revenue (excluding VAT) in Europe.
A dedicated, multidisciplinary team came together at Lafuma Mobilier for this strategic project: Edward Grospiron, Digital & E-commerce Director; Samuel Hadjaji, IT Director; Elodie Comacle, Product Owner; and Fabien Ballario, Acquisition Data Feed Manager and PIM Lead.
A modern, high-performance e-commerce platform that lets the French brand showcase its range and share high-value information… all while giving users a smooth, efficient experience and reflecting the brand’s values.
Magento 1 could no longer keep up. Running out of steam, the solution was causing many problems for Lafuma Mobilier’s teams. With every new development, technical debt piled up, and investments of both time and energy went to waste. Security vulnerabilities appeared, and updating information was chaotic, relying on tedious, time-consuming manual imports. In short, Lafuma Mobilier was stuck with an end-of-life solution.
“It was becoming far too unstable and too cumbersome to manage. We were on a solution that had no future, with very limited performance. It was getting really hard for the teams, who were worn out by an outdated solution and were losing more and more efficiency.”
In early 2023, Lafuma Mobilier’s digital and IT teams took charge of driving the change. They drew up a shortlist of vendors and, at the same time, benchmarked the technologies on the market. Out of these vendors and technologies, Synolia and Adobe Commerce won the tender.
With more than 15 years of deep expertise in Adobe Commerce, Synolia stood out as the partner able to successfully replatform Lafuma Mobilier from Magento 1, all the more so since Synolia had led that project 10 years earlier. Synolia’s proven experience and technical expertise in Adobe Commerce convinced Lafuma Mobilier to renew its trust in this pragmatic, flexible partner, whose teams were 100% committed to the project.
Future-proof, scalable, extensible, modern, multilingual, multi-currency… These are just some of the factors that steered Lafuma Mobilier toward Adobe Commerce. Its ability to perform under heavy load, and the favorable SEO assessment from Synolia and CyberCité (the SEO agency brought in to support the redesign), reinforced the digital team’s decision.
“The relationship we had built with Synolia over 10 years naturally played a part in our final decision. Add to that the human touch they bring to their projects and their well-established expertise in Adobe Commerce. Continuing with this partner was a logical next step after the first project on Magento 1. Choosing Adobe Commerce also reduced the risks.”
As an alternative to Adobe Commerce’s native themes, Hyvä caught Synolia’s attention for this e-commerce project.
Choosing Hyvä was driven first and foremost by the need to significantly improve the web performance of Lafuma Mobilier’s e-commerce site. Synolia’s consulting team, backed by its business intelligence team, built a web performance monitoring platform. This tool brought to light the weaknesses of Lafuma Mobilier’s e-commerce platform, which Hyvä then resolved.
The work Synolia carried out with Lafuma Mobilier on Hyvä squarely addressed the project’s key challenges:
By using the Hyvä theme and putting SEO and web performance at the heart of this replatforming project, Lafuma Mobilier improved its search rankings while delivering a better user experience.
“With a heavy “Google dependency” and steadily rising cost-per-click, we had demanding SEO requirements to diversify our traffic. The three-way collaboration between Synolia, CyberCité, and our in-house teams increased our visibility in search engines on competitive queries.”
Lafuma Mobilier runs both B2B and B2C businesses. One of the challenges of the replatforming was therefore to bring these two activities together on the same site, while letting users identify themselves as consumers or professionals to optimize their journey.
As a result, the e-commerce site menu now features a “Pro furniture” section, accessible in a single click, along with clear labeling of professional products and dedicated services such as quote requests. Since Lafuma Mobilier also sells spare parts, a special menu section was created for this part of the brand’s business.
To showcase the products as effectively as possible, extensive UX/UI work was carried out with the expertise of the agencies Stash and Studiobis, supported by user testing, to highlight each product’s key features and build customer confidence.
“The Agile methodology, built on more than 300 user stories, allowed us to adjust our project and be ready on time for launch day. We worked hand in hand with the Synolia teams to make this redesign a shared success. We now apply this methodology to other company projects at Lafuma Mobilier.”
Lafuma Mobilier’s replatforming project also reflects a desire to promote the brand’s values: made in France, of course, but also the durability of its products.
The goal here is to showcase the work done by Lafuma Mobilier’s teams around the company’s values. It is about building a connection with future buyers and demonstrating the brand’s expertise, through its commitments (especially in eco-design) as well as its history and the proven durability of products that last for generations.
From day one, Lafuma Mobilier’s e-commerce site was built to be multilingual. It is available in seven languages (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and even Japanese). E-commerce sales, for their part, target more than 200 million internet users in these European countries, including Austria and the United Kingdom.
Offering such a wide range of options required significant work to adapt Lafuma Mobilier’s offers to the specifics of each country, and its content to each market.
On January 9, 2024, after successive rounds of testing, it was time to go live! Lafuma Mobilier’s e-commerce site officially got its makeover. Within the first few weeks after go-live, Lafuma Mobilier was already reaping the first benefits of this replatforming project:
“Today, thanks in particular to the Hyvä theme, we are one of the best-performing Adobe Commerce sites out there (according to our SEO agency). We have not lost any SEO traffic, and we are gaining more. The site’s web performance has skyrocketed, especially load times. Our teams can now move forward with peace of mind. Time-to-market has been reduced. All the indicators are green, even though a new chapter is only just beginning.”
The Lafuma Mobilier x Synolia x Adobe Commerce project keeps going! Synolia provides application maintenance for the French brand, which intends to keep laying the building blocks of a comprehensive digital ecosystem around Adobe Commerce.
The customer relationship work that Synolia and Lafuma Mobilier started with the Zendesk project is also set to evolve, with the aim of building an ongoing, lasting dialogue between the brand and its consumers.
Lafuma Mobilier is a French brand with international reach, with more than 50% of its business generated outside France. Rolling out the site to new regions is part of the roadmap.
“A replatforming delivered in 6 months is a big challenge, and a real achievement for the teams involved in this project. The key to success was the motivation shown by all stakeholders.”
“The replatforming was a chance to kill two birds with one stone! First, moving to the future-proof Adobe Commerce Cloud platform. Then, setting up our Afineo PIM/DAM and connecting it to our site. A winning combination for greater operational efficiency in managing the product and sales cycle.”
Want to learn more about the Lafuma Mobilier project and building an e-commerce platform? Contact Synolia, your e-commerce partner agency!
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"Hats off to the Synolia teams. A project like this takes real commitment. It goes far beyond a simple brand-agency relationship. While other agencies are of course highly skilled too, it is clear that any company, any brand, would do well to talk to Synolia about their project."
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