Hestra goes Direct-to-Consumer for the first time ever

The family run heritage glove-brand, Hestra, started out by producing quality gloves for loggers 85 years ago. The brand quickly became popular, most known for its craftsmanship and quality. Today, Hestra is the market leading glove-brand globally, with a wide selection of products covering everything from the original logger models, to skiiers, mountain-bikers, and any pretty much any other active sport or activity where gloves are essential. The brand has a long and successful history of selling through physical retail and wholesale channels – and has now expanded its business with a smoking-hot, global direct-to-consumer store that is open for business in the world at large. Hestra has, together with the award winning design agency Grebban, and the brand-focused e-commerce platform Centra, worked intensively to create a world-class digital experience that gives the visitor that same smell and feeling of leather and quality as they would get in one of Hestra's physical stores.

"We are incredibly excited about our new digital flagship store. Thanks to the quality of our products, we've always had a large proportion of recurring customers that will use our gloves for several years until it's time to buy a new pair. Our gloves and models are timeless, so when a customer finds a favorite, they'll stick with that model forever. Our new digital experience makes it a lot easier for returning customers' to come back for a re-buy, without having to walk into a store. It also gives us a change to give new customers an experience that reflects the same strong impression of quality and sustainability that's presented in our physical stores globally" says Emilia Svärm, Marketing and Communications Manager at Hestra.

The new digital flagship store is open to the world – but specifically localized on the target markets that include the entire EU, Norway and the United Kingdom – as well as the United States. Hestra's sales are currently split around 50/50 between Europe and the USA – so the organization has built separate e-commerce teams to maximize results. 

Emilia Svärm continues:

"In order to achieve our steep sales targets, we must be agile and flexible with the content and products depending on which season it is – it's always winter or summer somewhere in the world. Centra's technology helps us control content per market in a very sophisticated and straight-forward way. We evaluated a bunch of platforms and agencies in the pre-study, but Centra and Grebban's track-record of delivering powerful e-commerce experience for other brands of our size sealed the deal, and we couldn't be happier with the outcome. We've been able to design the site without limits to either appearance or technology – you can almost smell the leather when visiting the site."

Visit Hestra's new digital flagship store here.