How automation fueled Rivièra Maison's marketplace expansion success

Using ChannelEngine to integrate and automate has enabled more of Rivièra Maison’s resources to serve their customers and achieve stronger growth.

Results summary:

Using ChannelEngine to integrate and automate has enabled more of Rivièra Maison’s resources to serve their customers and achieve stronger growth. As a result, there has been more time and resources to enable them to start selling on more marketplaces. The company has expanded from selling through just a few channels last year to 10 different marketplaces this year.

Brenda has translated to revenue growth of ~200%, essentially double the revenue, thanks to using ChannelEngine to expand and optimize their selling on marketplaces. And this is just the beginning.

Company overview

Rivièra Maison is an international brand that specializes in furniture, homeware, and lifestyle products. The company prides itself in making everyone feel at home with a select range of stylish modern, traditional, and timeless designs. Rivièra Maison has grown considerably from its humble roots as a florist in Amsterdam, becoming a leading brand in comfortable and chic living. Starting as a family business with just five staff, the company is now a successful, multinational enterprise that employs over 500 people.

For Rivièra Maison, “home is where you can be you,” and they take great care to design and produce furniture, homewares, and accessories that achieve this goal. Despite growing to reach more customers internationally, the brand still retains the same cozy feel in every store and with each item they design, produce, and sell.

As the business has developed, its ambitions have also grown. Rivièra Maison has continued to gain international popularity, expanding in recent years by opening stores in key markets such as Norway and Germany. A key part of this recipe has been their ability to grow international sales (and their customer base) via online marketplaces. ChannelEngine is proud to be a part of this success story.

The situation

Before teaming up with ChannelEngine, Rivièra Maison had already launched its own successful webshop. The brand was also selling on a few selected marketplaces, such as Bol.com, which serves customers in the Netherlands and Belgium.

However, like many businesses that started selling on marketplaces, they quickly discovered that manual inventory and order processes were a serious constraint on growth. According to Rivièra Maison’s Online Specialist, Brenda Schenkius, “Before, everything was done by hand, and this was a lot of work – so it wasn’t good for expanding the business”.

In all areas, handling each marketplace separately took up much more time than it needed to. Every single product offering has to be optimized separately - for each marketplace. Orders and returns were also laborious to handle manually, and these had to be coordinated with logistics providers. Without a way to automate and unify these processes, increased sales were going to become increasingly difficult to attain.

Seeing that a solution was needed, Rivièra Maison made the decision to use ChannelEngine as an integration partner.

The solution

The company quickly made use of the advantages that come with using ChannelEngine as an integration partner, including automation and simplified management with a single dashboard.

Instead of using time-consuming manual processes, product content is now handled using the easy content manager, which enables optimized product content for each marketplace. This isn’t easy to do manually when you offer more than 500 SKUs (which are regularly updated or replaced when new designs and collections are released).

Orders and returns are now handled using a single, simple process - and everything (that can be) is now totally automated.

ChannelEngine’s insights are also helping the brand to ensure that their customers are satisfied and that every listing is optimized. Considering the breadth and depth of Rivièra Maison’s product offerings, these insights would be hard to attain or manage with manual processes. Now, the insights from ChannelEngine clearly show where improvements can be made, and things can be easily adjusted whenever needed.

With the convenient dashboard, it’s easy to have total visibility over your stock and sales. As a result, you can really see what’s going on - across every channel. The visibility of returns data, in particular, is a huge advantage. It has helped the company gain better insights into how they can better serve their customers and ensure they have the right information to make the right purchase. This optimization can vary a lot from one marketplace to another, so having access to this kind of detailed information is a key to successful growth.

Future Steps

Rivièra Maison enjoys strong demand and healthy growth in key strategic markets, especially in Europe. Over the next year, the company already plans to use ChannelEngine to expand into selected new marketplaces, to reach more customers in Europe, including those in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Thanks to their use of 3PL providers in combination with automation of order and returns, their business models are already well-tuned to the demands of efficient online selling. This means the company is well-placed for future growth too.

With ChannelEngine at their side, it’s easier and more efficient to expand into new marketplaces and channels, so the future for Rivièra Maison is looking bright.