Leonidas
The assignment
Leonidas has existed for more than 100 years and is the chocolate brand known worldwide for its chocolates. 100 years ago, Leonidas Kestekides developed the first bonbon and since then the following four generations have developed the brand into a large family business. With more than 1300 stores around the world, everyone enjoys the delicious chocolates. The value for money is excellent as the products are made without animal fats and palm oil at a price everyone can afford. Leonidas is also certified as a purveyor to the royal household by Belgium's King Philippe! We were therefore very excited when we were asked to build the new webshop for Leonidas Bonbons.
Mariska and Joris van Maele own Leonidasbonbons.nl and deliver chocolates to companies and consumers. For example, companies can sell Leonidas bonbons in addition to their normal range, they can only sell Leonidas bonbons or they can offer Leonidas products in a hotel or catering establishment. Consumers can also buy boxes of chocolates with personalised greeting cards attached.
"THE SWITCH TO WOOCOMMERCE TURNED OUT TO BE A NIGHTMARE."
The previous webshop of Leonidas chocolates was running in Magento 1. Joris explains, "When we had to migrate from Magento 1 to 2, the party working with us told us that we had too few products and therefore Magento was actually too expensive for us. They advised us to switch to Woocommerce, because you could also blog with it to rank higher in Google. That turned out to be a nightmare. Woocommerce is apparently very sensitive to hackers and our webshop was hacked. Fortunately, we have now switched to Lightspeed. A company around here that we know used it and had good experiences with it, so the choice was quickly made."
After our UX designers had reviewed the old webshop, they found that in terms of usability, there were still improvements to be made in the back- and front-end. We therefore chose to build the new webshop in SaaS Ecommerce platform Lightspeed, so that Leonidas can process orders in a secure environment and by making adjustments in the front-end, customers can also put together their own flavors and greeting cards. We used a Lightspeed theme in which we made some graphical adjustments based on Leonidas' wishes and our expertise.
Excellent support
Before opening a new webshop in Lightspeed, Joris was a little hesitant. "I was always afraid, because I thought I had to set up the entire webshop myself, but now that I see what you can do in Lightspeed, I don't have to. You get excellent support and everything is included so you don't have to invent the wheel yourself. You are bound to certain themes, but they are so extensive that it doesn't really matter. The only piece of customization are the greeting cards that you can order with your box of chocolates."
Joris is very pleased with the collaboration. "We chose Notive because it is a young company with a strong portfolio. In the past we had a bad experience with a party so we wanted to work with a serious company now. With a young company you also notice that they come up with different ideas, because the Internet is still linked to age. My wife and I are both 56 and did not grow up with the Internet. So much is changing that it's important to have a young team. Also, Lightspeed gives a lot of webinars which gives us even more information. In addition, the sprints were also clear so you know where you stand every time."
The Result
With the new Lightspeed webshop, Leonidas bonbons can offer its products for both b2b and b2c. We also made sure the Leonidas webshop was ready in time for Mother's Day, so that after missing out on Valentine's Day and Easter because of the hacked webshop, they could still enjoy Mother's Day. In addition, personalized greeting cards can be made with boxes of chocolates and you can compose the flavors yourself. Joris can now do a lot of things himself in the back-end and the front-end is nicely implemented.
After the Leonidas webshop has gone live, we will continue to develop it. We will build an integration with Channable, which is a connection platform for marketplaces like Bol.com and Amazon. Through this connection, the products of the Leonidas webshop are synchronised with other platforms so you never sell more than you have in stock.
View the webshop
Joris van Maele
Because the project is divided into sprints, you knew exactly where you stood each time.
