Building Blocks for eCommerce Success: HABA FAMILYGROUP & Contentful

The loudly named HABA FAMILYGROUP is a toy company from Germany that operates a collection of brands. 

Like many of its competitors, the feeling of being pulled in an either-or direction is strong when it comes to content solutions. 

More specifically, they see the binary as either headless or traditional. 

Yet there’s also room for complexity, because binary doesn’t quite reflect reality. It’s a reality that HABA FAMILYGROUP is seeing as they exchange their monolithic content management system for a whole new one in Contentful in addition to other tech to build a unique stack. 

HABA FAMILYGROUP began experimenting with this for one of its brands, JAKO-O – one of its toy and children’s fashion brands. 

They have already seen positive results when it comes to KPIs such as conversion rates and the average order value. 

For the family 

Throughout the 80 years of business, HABA FAMILYGROUP has managed to adapt and expand its collection of brands. 

This agility powered them into experimenting with JAKO-O’s ecommerce site that has, in the words of the head of customer experience, Henrik Fischer, “had been losing sales for several years.” 

Talking of tactics: “The most customer-friendly environment is mobile,” added Henrik, “which we were struggling to participate in. We had to change something to set up our architecture and shop for the future.” 

Yet HABA FAMILYGROUP wanted to go beyond. They wanted to increase the average order value, boost conversion rates, and strengthen customer satisfaction while at the same time lowering bounce rates. 

The work 

Once they got their team together, HABA started to think about how tech and architecture could be envisioned to support the company and boost KPIs. 

As an example, the creative and development teams at HABA wanted a way to promote productivity without spending a lot of time on maintaining systems. 

The technology that they decided to center around was Contentful, which was considered the right fit due to its modern, scalable, and extensible capabilities. 

The rise of HABA involved managing both a B2C as well as a B2B, operating locally to globally, and offering products in Europe, North America, and Asia. This means scalability is vital for the success of the company. 

“Maintenance is an expense, especially for content,” added Henrik, “which is where we want to be smarter, faster, have new functionalities and increase system stability.” By utilizing universal content, editorial teams can create and maintain content much easier, and the dependence on development decreases. 

And with reusable content, HABA can use the same text and images for its JAKO-O campaign in addition to other channels and its other content management systems, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. 

While supporting omnichannel campaigns, its new tech stack makes it easier to share product information, creating a strong knowledge base for team members to search for content.

Personalization 

“We like being able to choose the best tool on the market for the tasks we’re working on,” said Henrik. As one example, HABA’s microservice stack includes Dynamic Yield and Algolia. Without an API-led CMS like Contentful, personalization capabilities are much less streamlines and depends on greater levels of development. 

For example, JAKO-O is now able to power individualized customer experiences by using Dynamic Yield to select chunks of content and pair them with audience segments. 

In addition, they can also link products to unique content that respond to questions or provide greater detail. 

By tying their content to Contentful, HABA FAMILYGROUP has seemed to set up a formula that they may even roll out to other brands besides JAKO-O. 

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful dev teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.