Case study
Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen ‑ luxury powered by a headless platform
Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen is a family-run fine jewelry brand. Their craftsmanship is internationally appreciated. With Centra, they can deliver a luxury customer experience on their website.
OLE LYNGGAARD COPENHAGEN creates fine jewelry appreciated by international customers. Founded in 1963 by Ole Lynggaard, they introduced unique designs by combining craftsmanship with inspiration from nature. It’s a family-run company, owned since 2003 by Ole’s children, Søren and Charlotte Lynggaard. Over the years, they’ve received recognition all around the world and have become the jeweler for the Danish Royal Family. Charlotte Lynggaard, who is now one of the most well known and talented jewelry designers in the world, made Crown Princess Mary’s Midnight Tiara. Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen is working with 18 carat gold, precious stones and the highest grades of diamonds.
Challenges of building a luxury customer experience
When Simon Shin Spanggaard Krog joined the company as the head of ecommerce, Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen was using Magento 2. He didn’t have any previous experience with this platform but quickly became disappointed. CMS was very confusing and inefficient, the connections between functionalities didn’t make any sense, and the store was built against all best practices. Overcoding one feature over another negatively impacted the site’s performance. On top of that, it was a poor storefront experience. After a detailed current platform evaluation, he decided to look for a different provider going forward.
Simon's first instinct was to check Shopify.
I was familiar with Centra, but it wasn’t on top of my mind. I was hit by the branding and presence of Shopify – “you should always go with Shopify” – but I realized that what we wanted to do was not efficient and easy in Shopify. We had to go somewhere we had more freedom even though it meant building something from scratch. When you see the things to come, it’s quite obvious why we chose Centra.
Head of ecommerce at Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen
Centra seemed to be the platform best ready to help Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen achieve their global ambitions. Its capabilities around handling international sales were especially impressive in comparison to Shopify’s. Centra is one platform that handles it all – markets, currencies, languages, prices, shipping, payments and taxes. It’s an easy and efficient system that allows to manage all the markets from one administration panel and create fixed price lists in various currencies for different countries. That was important for Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen as they prepared to launch with their next four languages.
With so many plans in the pipeline, speed in time to market and freedom in development were a true concern. Centra’s great set of native features and a headless approach to development significantly reduce complexity and time of deployment.
Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen is a design-driven company always looking to achieve a higher level of personalization. Template-based design systems were pushing them into compromises and limiting their ability to express brand identity. Headless technology enables true design freedom from storefront to the checkout. The front end is fully separated from the back end, enabling agile development and choice of technology.
Simon ultimately decided that Shopify was a great platform, just not for them. He could start from scratch with Centra’s platform, meeting all the requirements out of the box and allowing him to focus on implementing Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen’s business strategy.
New partner, new shop, new customer experience
Ole Lynggaard was able to launch a completely new website that reflects their identity and has great performance. Centra’s localization features and efficiency helped them accomplish their plan to launch in new languages and grow their revenue.
Centra allows Ole Lynggaard to build the proper customer experience for their brand. Luxury fashion customer journeys are longer, with less space for error. Customers traditionally come from physical stores and can come back years after they initially found something they liked. Ole Lynggaard wants to bring the online experience to the farthest extent possible by implementing video appointments online and then involving contact with the personnel. In order to deliver a better experience, Ole Lynggaard requires specific reporting and data-fetching features. They want to examine the customer's lifetime. That wouldn’t be possible with their previous tech stack or Shopify.
Truly headless platform grants freedom in building very specific features like “Jewelry builder” that launched recently. It allows customers to personalize and visualize their jewelry.
Migration to Centra allowed Ole Lynggaard to:
Launch in two new languages, and get ready to launch in an additional two in Q2
Grow their revenue by 20% (while market was in decline)
Localize their ecommerce experience
Redesign their store
Build a personalized reporting system
Improve page speed
Improve organic traffic
Design the desired experience and choose the front-end technology to power it up
Ole Lynggaard's current ecommerce tech-stack on Centra
| Ecommerce platform | Centra |
|---|---|
| Front-end partner | Strømworks |
| ERP | BC Systems |
| Payment method | Adyen |
| CRM | MS Dynamics 365 |
| BI / Data analysis | Big Query |
