Idyllien was born in 2010 out of a desire to help the families of severely ill children. Today Idyllien is a combination of a flagship store, located in a 1700’s stone house in the medieval town of Visby, Gotland and an online store. The company’s surplus is directed to charity.
Idyllien wanted to move into a more international direction by updating its online store. Shopify and Shopify Plus Partner Woolman seized the opportunity to help Idyllien. The online store project was realised on a pro bono basis.
– We want to continue to use Idyllien as a creative platform for value creating cooperations between different companies, private initiatives and fund raising events. If we increase our sales in different countries it means we can also start up projects in the children’s hospitals also within these countries, says the founder and entrepreneur of Idyllien, Catrin Kylberg
Behind the story of Idyllien stands the Kylberg family. They experienced a serious illness with a child of their own and wanted to use the difficult experience to help other families facing the same situation.
Better data, better customer experience
Idyllien's old platform did not meet the company's needs and it was becoming a bottleneck for the development of the online store. Because Idyllien also has brick and mortar sales in addition to the online side, there was a desire to seamlessly integrate these two sales channels. Shopify was chosen to replace the old online store platform and Woolman was called in to help with the project.
– The store (online and offline) is the heart of Idyllien where we offer fantastic and unique products to our customers – sold for one purpose: To create surplus for the projects in the children’s hospitals. The more people that buy from us, the more we can do in the hospitals, Catrin Kylberg says.
The old platform also lacked enough capacity for analytics to help develop the online store. It offered next to no means of monitoring site traffic or visitor behaviour. Now this will also be rectified as Shopify's integrated analytics tool and other familiar tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. These tools will help Idyllien to develop the online store and customer experience further.
An app solves the problem of multiple language versions: there is only one Shopify online store and the installed additional app displays the chosen language version to the customer. Shopify's language solutions have been developing rapidly and the platform has native support for different translations. Idyllien's store makes use of this fresh feature.
The payment methods chosen for the store are Shopify Payments, which just became available in Sweden in the spring of 2020, and Klarna payments, which are popular in the Nordics.
Island atmosphere at home
The products on offer at the online store are steeped in the atmosphere, nature and tranquillity of the island of Gotland. In fact, the goal is that once a traveller has returned home from a vacation in Gotland, they can return to the spirit of the largest island in the Baltic Sea through our online store and keep enjoying the products they enjoyed on the island also at home.
Now that the online store solution meets their needs and is continually being updated, Idyllien can focus on developing their online sales.
– We would like to grow on the global market of course, focusing first of all on our EU countries. It would be great to start up projects in more countries and find bigger and better cooperations within these countries to be able to do so. It’s going to be a challenge, but the goal is clear: If we can make the stay in the hospital a little better for one child, we have done some good, Catrin says.
