GRUNDENS fishing and clothing company is not a typical e -commerce store. This Swedish brand has the history of equipment directly to professionals and providing equipment through wholesale channels. It was not until recently that they had only been involved in selling directly for consumers.
Although -or maybe because of the recent coronary virus eruption, the business has been growing and rising all the way. We sat down with GRUNDENS global network manager Brandon (actually virtual) and listened to all the technical stacks he integrated.
Q: Please introduce the GRUNDENS brand.
The company was founded by a fisherman in the early 1900 to produce oil and keep other fishermen warm and dry. The company’s philosophy is that the people of fishing are the steward of the ocean, and they should take this responsibility seriously.
Q: What do you think of the brand?
This is a lifestyle for fishing people. This is not just one thing that people do -it was born in them and existed in their DNA. It becomes a decisive feature. This is a powerful treatment for many people with leisure fishing.
Q: How did you finally work in a Swedish fishing and clothing company?
In the early 1990s, the two local fishermen brothers in Washington became Garen’s general dealer in the United States. They made GRUNDENS USA a company worth more than $ 24 million. I was introduced to the company as a contractor in 2007, until 2017, my responsibility was to support the growth and expansion of the United States. The two owners Mike and David Jackson have the experience of fishing in Bai Linghai, but they need help in the brand’s network experience.
Q: How did you become a formal employee?
In 2017, they decided to expand their business and let me be a global network manager internally. This is really exciting, because I want to do too much, so that I have no chance to do it as a contractor. In the past few years, we have seen amazing growth, because we have already put the product from commercial installationPrepare to leisure fishing gear and shoes.
Q: Why do you think there are so many people buying fishing gear during the period?
Due to this epidemic, we have been growing, just like many and other people in the e -commerce industry. In the past eight to ten weeks, we saw 30% to 40% of growth. I think that for any outdoor brand, it is not just fishing, these are very enthusiastic people. They absolutely love outdoor activities. What we may be experiencing is that people feel that they can’t wait to return there. They don’t want to wait for one second to get water.
Q: Tell us your technical stack.
Let’s start with Woocommerce. Before moving to Woocommerce, I worked on several different platforms. At first, the company’s demand was very simple -we only had one online directory to meet the North American commercial fishing market. In 2015, when we opened products that are directly facing consumers, I introduced them to Woocommerce.
Q: Why do you choose Woocommerce?
At that time, the company was not sure how to enter the channel directly facing consumers (DTC) and did not want to make any huge investment. We chose Woocommerce because it is a very common platform that allows us to expand. It also integrates some functions we like in other DTC platforms, but it is relatively cheap. Since then, Woocommerce has always been a constant for us and has performed very well.
I also like the integration of woocommerce and WordPress. The entire ecosystem operates well. We can bring woocommerce fragments to the website content, and vice versa. It is just a very powerful tool, which seems to be native to WordPress. It can also be used with many other plugins.
: Your favorite tool is What?
YOTPO, which is great for comments. this is oneA strong customer review platform, we can get on the ship without spending a lot of money. Klaviyo, an email marketing tool. It is not just an ERP (enterprise resource planning application), it has almost CRM function. It enables you to make strong customer files and be good at subdivision to measure the opening rate and improve the click -through rate. The conversion tracking is also great. These two tools have indeed improved the conversion rate and income and helped us collect valuable data. And Microsoft’s Dynamics Nav, an ERP for finance, CRM, supply chain, etc. We implemented it in May 2017. The company has developed to the point where the financial department requires more capabilities. We have a wholesale channel selling to physical stores and Amazon, and a channel for consumers that use Woocommerce to directly target consumers. We have established a connector for WooCommerce and NAV to communicate with each other. Therefore, NAV can contact WooCommerce, get the order details and send back the inventory details.
For the new store, I strongly recommend shipstation. We do not use it at present, but it is very valuable in the past projects. For many companies, performance is a difficult task. ShipStation and the site integrate to automate and relieve many pain points. W3 Total Cache is very suitable for SEO U/X performance. It helped us truly raise our sales experience to a new level. Facetwp is a high -level filtering and search plug -in for WordPress and WoOocommerce. Customers can search for SPF value of shirts or specific color samples. For e -commerce stores that value additional flexibility, this is a great plug -in.
Instantsearch is very suitable for search and sales. I strongly recommend this service to get the speed of insight and search results.
all tasks related to the automation of avalarra. We need a solution that can be used globally to calculate taxes and European VAT. Avarara’s collection and remittances are important for us because we have a small financial team. It is easy to use and provide seamless WoOOCOMMERCE integration. For payment processingAmazon Pay is its own product. It is basically just running. From a user perspective, if you have logged in to Amazon, this is a two -key or three -key checkout solution. We have one -third of our customers using it. We use Authorize.net as the main credit card processor, and we also provide Apple Pay.
For internal communication, our IT supervisor has set up Microsoft Teams for us. This is an indispensable part of our internal work. But I also conducted external meetings with each video conference platform all day, so my computer has been overwhelmed by these updates.
Q: What value do you think of woocommerce? Take a step back, one of the most useful things I have experienced on Woocommerce is to join third -party services (such as payment processors and review platforms) relatively easy and low cost. Visiting advanced extensions saves us a lot of custom development time and resources.
Q: Do you fish?
I like outdoor activities, hoping and dreaming that I can go out more. I really want to fish deeper. This is a healing and venting thing. Most of the time, I usually sit in front of the computer, but I like it! I am enthusiastic about technology, just like Grundns fishing for fishing.
