Setting Xlash up for Global eCommerce Expansion

• Headquarters: Stockholm, Sweden
• Technology Stack: Centra, Business Central, Yotpo, Klaviyo, Klarna, Ayden

As one of the fastest-growing makeup and skincare brands on the market, Xlash was at a pivotal point to reinvent its entire system. Working with Swedish-based agency Made People ensured their experience with Storyblok was set up for success and could provide scalability into new locales and regions. Only one month after the launch of their new site with Storyblok, organic traffic almost doubled, with 90% of site visitors coming through mobile. The overall solution aided their scalability needs, regardless of market or language, while offering a best-of-breed selection. 

Challenges faced by a global eCommerce brand with a WordPress setup

Xlash previously had a messy setup with 8 different WordPress stores. These were made with a custom-built middle layer, ensuring orders and stocks were synced for 6 localized and 1 global store. Over time, this became a hassle to work with - plus, keeping all markets up to date separately and statically was another pain point for the team. The brand faced numerous challenges found in its monolithic setup:

• The inability to streamline multiple stores for different markets: Processes and page updates had to be done up to 8 times in each market’s store. There was no efficient way to copy content or pages with their eCommerce team managing up to 8 logins. This resulted in double work for the team. 
• Failure to automatically sync the storefront frontend with their ERP system: Any product stock uploads had to be done manually. The team had to move into each store and attempt to sync with their entire order flow (through Business Central as their ERP). This was due to WordPress’s monolithic structure, which could not automatically sync with the ERP. As a result, many issues occurred on the customer side where a product’s overall stock quantity would not reflect the actual number of products left in stock. 
• Monolithic burdens for growth: The challenges faced reached the systems’ limit and hindered their overall scalability and growth. The only way to scale with such a restrictive system was to hire more admins to manage the overwhelming workload, eventually adding to more static internal processes.

Storyblok's solutions for growth and scalability

Xlash came to Made People as a fast-growing eCommerce and B2B makeup brand, quickly expanding into new markets and languages. The brand needed to localize content to each market by bringing new content to market quickly and easily in an efficient manner. 

Storyblok was able to bring Xlash’s desire to grow and scale to reality through:

• The Visual Editor that allows you to see what customers will see in different formats (web and mobile sites), making it easy for non-technical users to understand what they are doing
• Manage content smoothly and easily across all market sites and languages in a centralized location
• Being an easy-to-use system for technical and non-technical users with a simple onboarding and implementation process of just 4 months
• Enabling collaboration and workflows amongst teams to boost their efficiency and creativity toward optimizing their customer’s experience
• Providing a best-of-breed setup for Xlash to configure and fit any integration that would boost their business and streamline the customer experience

All product pages are built inside Storyblok, with all referenced real data coming directly from Centra (eCommerce platform). While there is no sync between Storyblok and Centra, all content is built using references from Centra to a certain product. ​​In Xlash’s early days, the site hosted only a few products (around 10 to 15), whereas nowadays, its catalog ranges into hundreds of various bundles through a compilation of different products.

Marketers can handle all products from Centra to campaigns and pages directly inside Storyblok. In the long run, this has also changed Xlash’s team collaboration and workflows, allowing them to boost their creativity toward optimizing their customers' experience. 

Tools & Integrations that powered Xlash’s eCommerce setup

Made People aided Xlash’s setup by integrating eCommerce solutions to Storyblok’s CMS interface. Xlash’s content editors and marketers can easily apply such integrations to any project, campaign, or page they want. The following integrations are used within Storyblok:

• Centra - eCommerce platform: Order Management System, PIM (Product Information Management), Payment, WMS, Promotions
• Business Central: An enterprise resource planning system from Microsoft
• Yotpo: A marketing platform that displays and handles customer reviews, referrals, and visual loyalty marketing, allowing the team to work with more review user-generated content
• Yotpo Visual UGC: Manages a direct Instagram display component (all handled directly in Storyblok through a UGC connection made by Made People) that brings Xlash’s Instagram gallery and presents personalized content according to the product fold and page
• Klaviyo: A newsletter function catered exactly to the customer’s interests
• Localization & Translations
• Klarna & Ayden: Provides online financial services such as payments for online storefronts, as well as post-purchase payments

Localization: Speaking customers’ language

Using Storyblok’s folder-type translations, Xlash manages its different sites and locales. The sites are built for new markets using each page as a branch from their ‘Global’ site. Based on each market, translated content can easily be switched out to match the market. This makes it easy for the team to reuse pages from a global format in the long run and hone in on their marketing efforts with more localized versions. 

As with eCommerce, the URL counts for everything, the lowest common denominator defining each site by a country code. Made People used country codes per URL to determine which site belonged to which market and added a market container to the setup. This acts as a dummy component block inside Storyblok that allows content editors to select all the different markets (such as EU, US, FR, etc.) to only render for that market. 

With Centra, products can be pulled to specific market sites to cater to a specific storefront’s region. Today, Xlash is available in over 120+ countries, 12 languages, and over 7 currencies. 

A global site set for scalability and the mobile-world

Xlash has its sights set on expansion, with future projects diving into creating a membership program built with different tiers. Content and personalized customer pages would be built in Storyblok through Yotpo and Centra. Every currency spent would equal a point toward building a customer’s membership tier. In the future, this would create personalized, tailored versions of content and pages for each tier customer type.

Storyblok’s CMS is tailored to fit Xlash’s scalability needs, regardless of market or language, while offering a best-of-breed solution for them to grow into as a future-proof setup.