Soft Goat ‑ Early adopters of new technology

Background

Soft Goat is a rapidly growing DNVB selling high quality cashmere garments online. The company was founded by the two friends Stephanie Bergström and Erik Magnuson who both had a sweet spot for cashmere shirts. They loved the material but found the available brands on the market to be well overpriced. With ecommerce on the rise, they figured there had to be a way to challenge the industry and cut costs in the supply chain with a digital‑first, direct‑to‑consumer approach. One month later Soft Goat was officially founded as a pure online player with traditional fashion brand values – and an early‑adopter mentality towards new technology. Soft Goat quickly grew from startup to global competitor. And now, 10 years later, they’re making a 5 MEUR turnover – forecast to increase by 10% in 2020.

Finding opportunities amidst a pandemic

When Covid‑19 hit the world, Soft Goat saw opportunities instead of threats. Fashion is in Soft Goat’s core, but they also pride themselves in being early adopters of new technology, as well as breaking new ground online. They sat down at the drawing board and looked into how they could create value in an otherwise very unfortunate and uncertain situation. 

They quickly found Bambuser – an up and coming live‑video‑shopping software targeted towards strong, influencer driven online brands. The timing of Bambuser’s product couldn’t have been better, as the entire world was in lockdown. At the time, there was no integration between Soft Goat’s ecommerce platform Centra and Bambuser – but thanks to Centra’s flexible APIs, and close collaboration between Bambuser, Centra and Soft Goat’s agency partner Stök, the new integration was built and tested in no‑time which enabled Soft Goat to focus what they do best – applying new technology and creativity for selling more products online. 

The campaign

Soft Goat’s first campaign featured the well renown fashion bloggers Ebba von Sydow and Emilia de Poret who together run Sweden’s largest fashion blog – Säker Stil. The campaign went live at 19:00 on the 19th of March and within the first 10 minutes they had 1200 active users on their site which totaled up to 1700+ throughout the campaign. With Centra’s powerful back end they were able to seamlessly handle the very high amounts of traffic while carrying out the live Shopping campaign through Bambuser’s software.

Soft Goat's current ecommerce tech-stack on Centra:

The result: record breaking sales and engagement

Soft Goat’s campaign was an instant success. Lasting for a total of 60 minutes and resulted in record breaking sales – 10x higher than a normal sales day. It also marked the spark of Bambuser and Centra’s strategic collaboration and was a clear proof‑of‑concept of how brands can reach users outside of the traditional ecommerce channels. By integrating new solutions through headless technology the user interface can take new shapes and forms. It can be an app, a watch, a digital magazine, or as in this case: a live video stream.  

The campaign generated some very impressive results:

• A 10x increase in sales compared to a normal sales day

• 1,670 customers watching the stream

• 25% of streamers added to cart

• 780+ direct chat messages received from customers

• 10+ articles published in major media outlets covering Soft Goat and the success of the campaign

Soft Goat has since then continued to launch live video shopping campaigns through Centra and Bambuser and will continue to do so in order to reach their goals of increasing their turnover by 10% in 2020.