Molton Brown's growth story

Molton Brown perfume and lipstick on a tray with pearls

The challenge

Molton Brown is a British fragrance and personal care brand, known for its perfumes, home, and bath-and-body products.

The brand has ecommerce channels in its major markets, including the UK, USA, and Japan. But with ambitious international growth targets, it was keen to launch lean ecommerce solutions for its smaller, distributor markets.

One option was to take the Hybris-powered ecommerce solutions it was using in its major markets and replicate these across its distributor markets. But this would have been a very costly and complex exercise.

Instead, the fragrance brand wanted a core environment or central platform from which it could easily launch and scale ecommerce propositions across distributor markets.

The platform needed to be powerful and cost-effective, with the flexibility to scale in line with business growth. The retailer’s international partners needed to be able to get to market quickly, with the freedom to meet the essential requirements in their individual markets.

At the same time, the platform needed to ensure central control over the brand and customer experience.

The key objectives were to:

Create a scalable, centralised ecommerce platform, with the capability to easily spin-up additional instances from which new markets (or distributors) can trade.
Deliver a commercially viable platform that secures early return on investment.
Ensure central governance over new ecommerce channels, with the flexibility to adapt to the individual needs of distributors and the markets in which they operate.
Provide a digital customer experience that reflects the brand identity and maintains a consistent brand experience in all markets, using the UK digital proposition as a baseline.
Deliver a solution that requires little maintenance and support from the UK to Molton Brown’s international partners.

What we did

Our initial work centred on partnering with Molton Brown to clearly define its commercial and strategic goals. We then mapped existing user journeys from the UK site to establish a set of core requirements for the new platform.

We included common capabilities required by all international distributors, taking into consideration market-specific requirements, such as payments, language, and compliance.

Using this approach we defined an MVP (minimum viable product) core product based on the business-critical features required for launch.

Together with Molton Brown, we identified SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform BigCommerce as the best fit for the retailer’s goals since it met the vast majority of requirements ‘out of the box’. Other advantages of choosing BigCommerce included the low total cost of ownership and overheads, ease of use, and the wealth of available third-party apps to easily extend functionality.

We then set about building and configuring Molton Brown’s core platform using the BigCommerce solution.

The results

Molton Brown now has a lean and powerful core platform that allows its international partners to rapidly launch and scale ecommerce propositions across its distributor markets.

The British fragrance brand is using this new platform to initially launch online shops in Italy, Greece and Cyprus (with more international markets to follow), while maintaining central control over the brand and customer experience.

Molton Brown will continue collaborating with Inviqa to enhance the customer experience it provides in these markets. Together we will roll out a prioritised backlog of additional features and capabilities, including flexible fulfillment and shipping options to meet customer expectations across multiple regions and markets, and a fragrance finder to help customers discover new items.

Despite the challenging COVID-19 environment, Molton Brown’s focus on digital acceleration and international ecommerce has delivered consistent wins. The luxury retailer secured an 81% year-on-year increase in online sales.

Thanks to the partnership with Inviqa, Molton Brown now has the tools to propel its international growth plans and meet its ambitious commercial objectives.

Recognition for excellence

We were thrilled to be selected as a 'finalist' in the 2020 BigCommerce Partner Awards in the Creative Problem Solving category in EMEA.

This is testament to the innovative work done by the entire Inviqa team. Through creative thinking and endeavour we produced a flexible core platform with BigCommerce that facilitated success for Molton Brown.