Monar

Monar is a multi-brand company that offers a wide range of products in high fashion, streetwear clothing, and footwear for men and women. Next to carrying popular brands in their assortment, they also have private labels that they offer in their own outlets and now their online shop. Active in B2B and B2C, the company recently became the first online shop in Belgium based on Shopware 6.

Realigned focus on digital growth

Monar started as a brick and mortar shop situated in the heart of Antwerp. After becoming successful locally, they decided to take their first step in online commerce by offering their products on a Belgian marketplace called Cityfashion, which ultimately proved itself to be unreliable as a platform. Seeing their potential expanding digitally, the company turned to implementation partner Polaris Digital Commerce to launch their first online shop, based on Lightspeed.

However, Monar quickly met the limits of Lightspeed. They wanted complete control over their online presence and were looking for a platform that could support their long-term business goals.

With their requirements in tow, they went back to the drawing board with Polaris Digital Commerce and mapped out what their ideal online shop could look like. Above all, it had to support multiple storefronts, be easy to use, offer intuitive tools for their marketing team and ecommerce managers, and be based on the latest technologies.

Investment in the future with Shopware 6

With Shopware 6, Polaris Digital Commerce managed to create a state of the art, fully functional webshop that met all of their requirements in less than 8 weeks. Now Monar is working with a platform that not only scales to meet their needs and aligns with their plans for the future, but also opens new possibilities for growth.

The Monar shop is the first of many to be launched within the coming year. Their Fiamme and Platform X subshops are slated to go live in Q2 and Q3 2020.

“We manufacture several brands ourselves and Shopware allows us to create multiple shops from one administration. In the future we plan to add our B2B activities to the Shopware platform,” says Tom De Maeijer, one of the business owners, on Monar’s plans to manage multiple brands from one system.

When evaluating platforms for their project, the team was also quickly drawn to the broad range of marketing features already available out of the box. The range of integrated marketing tools not only cut down on development costs but give their team the freedom to quickly change content and update seasonal promotions.

On their decision to recommend Shopware 6, Sven Smets from Polaris DC says: “Shopware is very unique. There are other interesting platforms, but either the manufacturer is an unreachable stranger to us, they are not willing to adapt their roadmap, way too expensive for our clients, not flexible enough, etc. I think Shopware 6 is on its way to becoming one of the most powerful, flexible, scalable and user-friendly platforms in its category.”

Merging offline and online in a seamless customer experience

Whether a customer visits one of their retail shops in Antwerp or discovers products through the online shop, they can expect a unified shopping experience. Monar’s retail locations distributed throughout Antwerp are abundant with natural light and feature thoughtful product presentation. Similarly, the online shop serves as a valuable extension to the brand and uses the same house style and branding as the physical stores.

Similar to a mannequin in their showroom, the online shop will soon feature “shop the look” collections to offer additional inspiration for potential combinations of their pieces.

Whether in store or online, Monar can meet the diverse needs of their customer base in the “look and feel” for which they are known. The online shop based on Shopware 6 now serves as an additional point of contact that positively influences the perception, experience and bottom line of the brand.