Springlane

Springlane - a young, fresh company with "We fuel people's passion for cooking" as its vision.

Since launching as a start-up in 2012, Springlane has believed that cooking and passion go hand in hand and empowered foodies with high-quality kitchen products; a vision now carried over to their new online shop based on Shopware, where the passionate chef can find everything their heart desires.

Springlane’s online shop sells around 150 kitchen appliances, grills, cooking accessories, books, crockery & table accessories in five main categories and 22 subcategories. Springlane develops kitchen products that are fun to use, make every day cooking easier and enhance the kitchen.

The company initially started its online business with products from various manufacturers.  These days, Springlane focuses exclusively on the development of its own products and brands including the popular "Springlane Kitchen" and "Burnhard" lines.

Connecting content & commerce through Shopping Worlds

Springlane’s recipe for success not only involves an impressive assortment of attractive products – community and community building are essential pillars of the company’s business model. Keeping this to heart, the new online shop inspires its community with two dedicated categories for content: recipe ideas and cooking knowledge. Moreover, Springlane puts various dishes to the test in their kitchen and shares them with their customers in its own online magazine.

Springlane's strong presence on social media gives it direct access to potential customers. Channels like Instagram and Pinterest not only act as an additional sales channel – the feedback and interests of the users flow directly into product development. For example, over 90,000 enthusiastic Instagram followers regularly comment on recipe ideas and product launches or take part in competitions.

It is therefore not surprising that the highest requirement for the new shop system was the integration of content & commerce.

"With the help of the Shopping Worlds, we now have the flexibility to design our product detail pages in the way we like best," Franziska Geiss, Product Manager at Springlane, on the integrated CMS functions of Shopware.

With a full page design full of valuable content, the product detail pages invite scrolling and seamlessly provide the customer with valuable product information. Product videos are also integrated on many detail pages, providing detailed care and use instructions.

Use of Shopware Premium Plugins

When it comes to creating timely promotions throughout the shop, Springlane turns towards Shopware’s Advanced Promotion Suite. From the shop backend, the company is able to easily plan campaigns and offer customers corresponding discounts over a certain period of time.

Moreover, Springlane supplements Shopware’s standard search functionality with the Smart Search plugin. Next to storing popular keywords and synonyms, this makes the search error-tolerant, and offers the customer a convenient suggestion function.

From this, the most important requirements for the relaunch were identified:

• A new corporate web

• International brand strengthening

• Omnichannel functions for B2C, B2B and retail

• Content commerce supported by a CMS

• High level of in-house flexibility in shop management

Future-oriented and competitive shop system

With the new online shop, Springlane has simplified numerous processes and benefits from  a reduced workload, giving the company more independence to focus on other core aspects of the business. “Whether design, content marketing or product manager – employees from various areas can easily adapt content in the shop backend thanks to its usability," summarises Manuela Bürger, Junior Product Manager at Springlane.

The surrounding ecosystem of available plugins, extensibility of the system and the large community were also decisive criteria in opting for Shopware. In addition, Springlane positively highlights the Shopware support team, which always responded quickly to enquiries and provided helpful suggestions for solutions during the implementation.

Short-time-to-market

With a team setup of four developers, a system administrator, two product managers and two designers, Springlane managed to migrate to Shopware in just three months. The Springlane installation is currently hosted by AWS.

Some of the implementation challenges involved the integration of custom Shopping World elements, as well as the integration and communication between plugins that fulfil similar functions, such as payment or one page checkout modules.

Looking towards the future, Springlane plans to integrate the Storytelling functionality into their Shopping Worlds. The company also has their sights on international expansion and plans to open additional subshops to reach foodies in other European markets.