We have traditionally been a D2C company, but we nevertheless had to transform the business model. We had a strong focus on the Italian market, a focus on only one product, olive oil, and we only reached consumers at home. These elements, which have been a source of competitive advantage for 100 years have begun to show their weak side as consumer behavior has evolved. With consumers increasingly showing a preference for direct contact with producers, the D2C model has remained a staple, but consumers want a more engaging experience that goes beyond the product they buy.
Therefore, our challenge was to create a model that could better convey the experience related to the food product, and we found the solution in the development of digital and physical: with a chain of single-brand stores.
The goals set forth were:
Two strongly linked worlds that feed off each other, creating greater penetration force, especially on potential customers. 10 years ago this relationship was not so evident and instead there was fear of cannibalization between the two channels.
The goal we set for ourselves early on was to be able to manage customers and the dynamics of pricing and promotions in an integrated way between the two channels so that we would always have an effective CRM, regardless of channel, and a consistent customer experience. Here the support of technology has been indispensable.
The challenge was to develop the product portfolio by shifting the focus from olive oil—an iconic staple of Italian culinary culture but with limited consumption outside of Italy—to a broader range of premium-quality Italian gastronomy.
As a result, we have significantly expanded the references in our catalog and successfully established the brand as a specialist in Italian food, not just olive oil. In fact, 50% of our revenue now comes from food products other than olive oil.
We faced three major challenges: digitalization, "materialization" through the development of a DOS retail chain, and internationalization. From the outset, our goal was to manage customers, pricing, and promotions in an integrated way across both channels, ensuring an effective CRM regardless of the channel and delivering a seamless experience for our customers. In this, the support of technology was indispensable.
We decided to redesign our eCommerce site to make it more adaptable to commercial needs and more engaging for our customers. We needed a CPQ engine that could centralize promotional strategies, and we chose to leverage Bit2win, which was already managing our other channels. We took it beyond the Salesforce ecosystem by adopting the new Multicloud architecture. This allowed us to manage all channels from a single system while accommodating the necessary specificities.
For a multichannel company like ours, the CPQ engine must be the center of all sales to our customers, capable of applying the prices and promotions we offer to our customers in both digital and offline communications.
Bit2win Multicloud sits at the heart of our architecture responding to the needs of the digital world, the call center, retail, and the postal channel. An important response to a complex challenge.
Future Challenges
Recently, by accepting the proposal of a new solution such as Bit2win Multicloud, we consolidated our partnership, sharing Bit2win’s strategic choice to implement an independent platform. We greatly appreciated the proposal to build this new solution together, thus giving us the opportunity to provide our contribution and expertise to have, at the end of the project, a platform that fully meets our business needs. We look forward, also in the future, to an increasingly close partnership that will ensure that the system is constantly in step with the ever-faster evolutions of the market.
We have gone from being a single-market, single-channel, single-product company to an omnichannel company that develops 30 percent of its sales abroad, partly due to a broader and more diverse product portfolio.
It will be essential to continue enhancing our communication and consumer engagement capabilities, particularly in the digital space. In fact, we are about to launch a significant project aimed at improving content management.