Groupe Rosa rethinks its digital platform with Synolia

The group has grown significantly since 2017, when it acquired the Envie de Fraise brand, founded in 2006. By adding a resolutely digital brand to its portfolio, Groupe Rosa took a real leap forward and made clear its intention to share this newly acquired expertise with its two other brands, while giving Envie de Fraise unique firepower in customer knowledge.

Groupe Rosa’s leadership has positioned the group as the only cross-channel player in its segment, thanks to an agile model that combines catalog, web and a national store network. The leader in France with a market share of more than 20%, Groupe Rosa now has a base of more than five million customers and around 500 employees. Today, it reports total revenue of €220 million, 30% of which is generated online.

Turning to digital

With this new acquisition, the group intends to deeply transform its organization. It wants to build on the e-commerce experience of pure player Envie de Fraise to reposition its strategy and drive a group-wide digital shift for its brands, which historically come from mail-order catalog sales and retail.

The project was therefore as much about helping define a corporate digital strategy, adapted to the positioning of each of the group’s brands, as about organizing the work of teams that had operated in relative silos until then, by pooling their skills. The main goal remained a smooth transition that would spark digital momentum across the whole group!

Synolia was brought in to support this project in several phases, so that decisions could be confirmed step by step. This made the shared transformation concrete and realistic with regard to the group’s investment objectives and its organization, which had been siloed until then.

A single e-commerce platform

The first step was to gather the information needed to scope the project: context, strategic objectives and work organization. This information was collected from decision makers and key users, which then made it possible to help each brand express its functional and technical requirements.

At this stage, and regardless of the technologies to be implemented, the main point was to validate the idea that, despite having to deal with the structural specificities of each brand and its markets, the e-commerce business of the whole group could be built on a single, shared technology foundation.

Guiding the technology choices

Once this objective was validated, Synolia’s role was to identify the e-commerce solutions on the market that fit this context and conduct a comparative study, independently of its partnerships with certain software vendors. This time, the main challenge was to project the budgets, timelines and organization required to design an entire digital ecosystem (e-commerce solution, PIM, ERP, sales offer management tool) against the group’s objectives and investment capacity.

Beyond the financial outlook, the project also had to take into account the group’s in-house multidisciplinary skills, brought together in a true cross-functional digital factory. The long-term goal is to bring in-house all the skills needed to administer, maintain and evolve the platform over time. For all these reasons, Sylius was ultimately chosen to build this brand platform and to support the growth of the group’s online revenue.

“We were very pleased with this first phase of support, which played a major part in getting the migration plan approved by the group’s executive bodies (a plan costing millions of euros, so a very carefully considered decision!)”, concludes Laurent Niederst.

Choosing Sylius, the e-commerce framework

Sylius saw Envie de Fraise as an ideal customer from the start, and the feeling was mutual. Originally designed for custom B2C and B2B e-commerce projects, Sylius offers technical quality, great flexibility and extensive customization options that make it the ideal solution for projects requiring processes that differ from standard projects.

“Synolia was a great help, sharing its e-commerce expertise and advising Groupe Rosa on every key decision. Their consultants’ input was invaluable in the workshops held with representatives of all the brands”, says Tymoteusz Stengert, New Business Lead at Sylius.

Envie de Fraise, the first brand to migrate to the new technical foundation, had inherited a heavily customized PrestaShop platform. The challenge was to carry over the features essential to the business without compromising the online performance of a brand generating more than €15 million in revenue.

Choosing Sylius made it possible to rely on the latest web technologies to keep these developments sustainable over time, while taking advantage of the customization capabilities of this e-commerce framework to custom-build dozens of specific features.

The start of a bigger story

The migration of the Envie de Fraise brand is only the beginning of a stronger partnership between Groupe Rosa, Sylius and Synolia. Once the current project is complete, Linvosges and Françoise Saget, the group’s two other brands, will also migrate to the Sylius Plus platform. “In this second phase, where we are now, Synolia has an excellent working relationship with all the teams and works with them in agile mode. And, something I care deeply about, they are perfectly comfortable explaining the available options to a backend developer as well as to a CRM manager, which is not always easy!”, explains Laurent Niederst.

The project will then boast an impressive best-of-breed technology stack (Sylius eCommerce, Akeneo PIM, Prismic CMS, Algolia for search, Sendinblue MA, Attraqt AI, Actito CRM, Zendesk for customer service, Netlify, Gatsby for the headless frontend…) that should become a leading reference for modern e-commerce implementations.

The integrations built with all these services should also help Sylius quickly earn a prime spot alongside the leading players in online commerce. “From day one, Synolia has been a partner we trust completely and who works hand in hand with us. In short, thanks to the strength of our in-house teams multiplied by co-development with Synolia, technological disruption becomes an everyday pleasure!”, affirms Laurent Niederst.