Bergans of Norway announced a major investment in the international digital marketplace a few weeks ago. The family-owned Norwegian outdoor brand has been a national icon for over a century, generating most of its sales in Norway and focusing its e-commerce platform on the domestic market. To enhance its omnichannel retailing and develop it abroad, however, it needed to reorganize its entire digital infrastructure.
After evaluating offers that participated in a competition for the contract, Bergans turned to two Swedish companies: Jetshop and Klarna. Jetshop is a Swedish e-commerce platform provider. As its chief executive, Fredrik Hedblom, points out, most Norwegian webshops have been using platform solutions that reside on the webshop’s own internal servers, but Jetshop provides an alternative by offering software as a service (SaaS), a cloud-based computing model that delivers software via the internet. Klarna, on the other hand, is an international payment solutions provider servicing over 190,000 merchants.
Like many other outdoor brands, Bergans is betting heavily on direct sales, currently operating three of its own brand stores in Norway and five outlets in Norway, Sweden and Germany. Speaking with E24, the Norwegian online business newspaper, Bergans’ chief executive, Jan Tore Jensen, reported that the company’s direct-to-consumer revenues amounted to 674 million Norwegian kroner (€66.3m-$73.5m) last year and are expected to account for 35 percent of total revenue five years from now.
While this SaaS e-commerce configuration has been operational for only a short time, Christopher Häggström, the interim chief digital officer of Bergans, tells us that the preliminary results have made him optimistic.
