Kuoma is a well-known Finnish shoe and children's clothing manufacturer. Kuoma approached Iona to help them with an international expansion by re-platforming the e-commerce solution and improving the user experience of the store.
Kuoma had been running a Woocommerce shop since 2020 in Finland and had localized versions of the website for other markets without e-commerce functionality. The ambition was to expand the direct-to-consumer business also to markets outside of Finland, but the solution did not support the need, some main reasons being that it was too complex and cost-wise inefficient to establish new markets. There were also no integrations to background systems, such as ERP, which caused a lot of manual work. By forming a multidisciplinary team consisting of Kuoma and IONA experts, we set out to solve these challenges together.
The first step of the way was to get familiar with Kuoma products and business to understand how value is being produced to the customers – what makes Kuoma the brand everyone loves. In the beginning stages, we also mapped out the current ecosystem and organization around Kuoma e-commerce. After understanding the current state, we continued to design the target state by documenting 300+ user stories and requirements, making a vision of the future architecture and most importantly the ideal user experience. The UX/UI was iterated through prototyping and validations with ffme. With a complete UI refresh, also product discovery has been improved from the past by redesigned navigation and filtering of the products.
The new Kuoma e-commerce solution is built on Shopify Plus and has a scalable integration to ERP. For easy maintainability, most extensions are done with Shopify Apps, enabling Kuoma to get turnkey solutions e.g. for marketing purposes in a quick timeframe. Since the launch of the new FI store in September Kuoma has already successfully expanded to two new markets: Sweden and Canada, and is looking to open even more to expand the D2C business. The sales of the FI store have multiplied compared to the previous e-commerce solution.
