Blåkläder

Founded in 1959, Blåkläder is a Swedish manufacturer of workwear with a primarily European customer base. The family-owned and operated company takes immense pride in its quality and design oriented approach, and like other brands from Sweden, just wants to be really good at what it does.

Blåkläder’s connection with Sri Lanka goes back almost two decades. The company opened its first manufacturing facility here in 2006 and has invested in a few more factories around the island nation. Today it considers Sri Lanka to be its production hub, using the country’s location to its advantage to coordinate production between factories in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Myanmar.

That Sri Lankan connection is what helped us say ‘ayubowan’ (a traditional Sri Lankan greeting which roughly means ‘may you live long and prosper’) to the good folks at Blåkläder, who decided to make use of our engineering expertise to supplement their in-house tech team’s efforts. 

Getting there wasn’t easy though, quite literally. To Blåkläder, we were a potential partner but from half a world away, so they took their time to understand whether we were a good fit for them. We visited their HQ twice, while Blåkläder’s CEO and eCommerce head both made visits to our development center in sunny Colombo.

How we set things up for success

Our earliest efforts were focused on supporting Blåkläder to make key technical enhancements to their web store as the company wanted to grow its D2C volume. Since it was an entirely new experience for them, our first milestone was more of a test to see if both sides could work together. It’s a perk we offer all our new clients, and is a very effective way to ensure working with a remote team yields results (Tip: We talk about this a lot in our Remote Team Playbook, go check it out here if you haven’t yet.)

We offered Blåkläder a minimally sized team to work with. The team’s goal was to integrate TrustPilot reviews into product pages on the online store, as social proof matters a lot when trying to drive conversions on the web.
It’s a task which sounds simple on paper, but when you consider the vast number of products involved and the need to make sure relevant reviews are shown for each product, things start to get a little bit…complicated. When our team managed to deliver well ahead of schedule and to positive feedback from the internal tech team over in Sweden, Blåkläder’s confidence in us grew. And with it came more things for the combined team to work on!

In the months since, we’ve helped Blåkläder improve the product search mechanism on their website, delivered ElasticSearch optimizations, and even implemented better SEO practices. In isolation, these may appear to be relatively miniscule cogs in the sprawling infrastructure behind a giant eCommerce website, but reality is that they are actually levers, i.e. they magnify the ability of the web store to convert visitors into paying customers. Consider for instance how improvements to the search mechanism can affect the volume of checkouts. Apart from visitors who decide to browse through the entire product catalog, the other kind of visitor to the online store is a repeat customer or a professional who’s looking for something they already use. For the latter, a well functioning search system is of absolute importance, as it helps them quickly make their purchase and go about their day. Another critical element are the filters on the search system and the logic behind them, as their performance directly affects which products will be shown and thus, the volume of products sold. Our team made both UI and technical improvements while working with external eCommerce consultants hired by Blåkläder. 

Compared to how things were before, Blåkläder’s online store now offers a better UI for its filtering mechanism along with upgraded logic, TrustPilot reviews, is liked better by Google, and literally operates much, much faster. It’s too early to tell, but we have a good feeling conversions have improved by quite a bit too.

Things have gone so well that Blåkläder has decided to enlarge the size of the team we’ve supplied them with. The icing on the cake is that it’s taken only a year or so for us to get there. Last year, a few members of the Blåkläder team chose to visit us here in Sri Lanka, and together, we’ve hatched plans for bigger and better things.

But, those are for another day. Ta!