Customer Spotlight: Boretti

This is a CTAC partner story. Explore the inriver partnership with CTAC >.

Boretti is an Italian culinary lifestyle brand. The company has been making high-end kitchen appliances, outdoor grills, wine cabinets, and other items for 25 years. Boretti artfully delivers the Italian experience to its customers. The brand is known for its excellent quality and affordable Italian design. The company is based in the Netherlands and sells their products across Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, and the Nordics.

Boretti has been helping customers across Europe experience Italian craftsmanship and “passione in cucina.” The brand was looking to scale globally to deliver the Italian experience to new geographies and markets. To accomplish this, they needed to build an infrastructure that could drive omnichannel commerce globally with an agile digital architecture to support continued growth.

Barry van der Groep, CIO of Boretti, began the search for a product information management (PIM) solution to act as the foundation for this project. Although the organization has been in business for 25 years, their digital architecture wasn’t robust enough to enable global e-commerce for both B2B and B2C segments. The project would be transformative, rebuilding an entire application landscape infrastructure. PIM was going to be the first implementation for the 12-24-month transformation.

“Inriver had everything we wanted and it wasn’t just my opinion. We all thought the inriver application, including the organization, and its future-readiness made inriver the right solution for us.”

Barry van der Groep

CIO, Boretti

the challenge

The challenge for Boretti and van der Groep was not obtaining buy-in for such a large-scale digital transformation, the project was fully supported by the organization. In fact, the actual business case came from within the team and once the project got started, there was intrinsic motivation to drive success said van der Groep.

Finding the right PIM solution and best partner to help implement and integrate the project effectively was the biggest challenge. There wasn’t any margin for error.

They wanted a solution that would be secure, SaaS, and flexible enough to meet the evolving needs of Boretti and their customers. The implementation partner needed to be a true partner, one that would help guide the process and decisions around the project, not just implement software.

Like many organizations, Boretti’s product information was not centralized in one place. Data was scattered across desktops, laptops, and in the marketing and product departments. To enable scalable e-commerce, the Boretti teams needed their product information in one central location, where it could be managed, enriched, and syndicated automatically, not manually.

In enhancing product information, van der Groep wanted to improve the customer experience as well to reduce the amount of returns and increase sales.

the solution

How to pick the right PIM solution out of a crowded tech landscape? Van der Groep identified a long list of PIM vendors, then narrowed it down to a short list of top PIM platforms, called for RFI proposals, demos, and finally, chose inriver as their solution.

Selecting the technology was just one part of the digital transformation.

Van der Groep also had to choose the right implementation partner for the project. As inriver’s largest partner in the Netherlands, Ctac, had extensive experience in building out global e-commerce solutions with inriver. More importantly, they offered agility and an aligned working style.

For Boretti, Ctac fit perfectly.

“We have a lot of new products coming in and new sales channels, it’s a growing organization, where people can become overloaded. Ctac really thought through things with us and helped us with our strategy, and also took extra steps when it was needed,” stated van der Groep.

“And they served as the partner on the stuff that we were not able to do ourselves, but we needed to do. So they’re really flexible and also managed us in a proper way. It was a very positive experience for me.”

“For me, the success of an implementation is highly related to the partner, and if they fit with who we are as a company. The integration was complex as we needed field mapping through our middleware with Shopify, which was relatively new, and our ERP.”

Barry van der Groep

CIO, Boretti

the result

Van der Groep lead the Boretti multi-phase transformation with Ctac. The timeframe was accelerated with a goal of basic implementation within three months. Next was phase two which included database integration, ERP, Shopify, including middleware parts and enhancing search. Then, finalizing connectivity parts.

Not only did Ctac complete the project on time, this all happened during the pandemic and global lockdowns. Although the teams couldn’t be together to run the project, weekly sprints helped keep the teams focused and communications strong.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and hard ROI metrics need time to surface. However, van der Groep does foresee early indicators of fewer returns and increased customer satisfaction.

The final results? Boretti outperformed last year’s revenue, despite the pandemic.

“For me, the number one advantage is now is being able to centralize all the product information. We have reduced the time needed to manage and onboard product information,” said van der Groep.

Advice for others looking to scale their business globally and implement a PIM?

“Try not to do too many things at the same moment, because that can be painful,” shares van der Groep.” Reserve enough time for the team, try to work on the project in a different environment than your usual workplace and you obviously need to have the proper team with different flavors such as product, marketing, tech, and maybe services, who are enthusiastic and intrinsically motivated to make it work.”