Dänisches Bettenlager

As a specialist for bedding, mattresses, home textiles and furniture, Dänisches Bettenlager stands for competent consulting and high quality in Scandinavian design and at reasonable prices. The company operates more than 970 stores in Germany (as of November 2019) as well as the online shop www.DaenischesBettenlager.de and employs around 8,000 people. Every household in Germany can reach a Dänisches Bettenlager store within a maximum of 20 minutes.

Dänisches Bettenlager is part of the Danish furniture company JYSK, which was founded in Aarhus in 1979 by the Danish businessman Lars Larsen. The first store in Germany was opened under the name Dänisches Bettenlager in Flensburg in 1984. On 1st September 2019, the two company divisions JYSK Nordic and Dänisches Bettenlager merged to form the JYSK business unit. Overall, the store network comprises more than 2,800 stores with 24,000 employees in 52 countries.

Initial Situation & Objectives

Dänisches Bettenlager GmbH & Co KG has its German-speaking head office in Flensburg; the group behind it, JYSK, has been an owner-managed, globally active company since 1979 and is based near Aarhus, Denmark. With over 250 stores in Germany alone and more than 25,000 employees worldwide, JYSK is one of the largest companies in the furniture industry.

After several of the group’s regional managers had heard a keynote lecture on the subject of digitisation by Christian Malik, founder and managing director of dotSource, the company approached dotSource. As there was a particular need for consulting on issues relating to omnichannel retail, a future-oriented digital strategy was to be developed from May 2015.

The cooperation started with a comprehensive analysis of the current situation, continued with joint workshops and led to a written omnichannel strategy and concrete roadmap after a few months.

Challenges & Procedure

Dänisches Bettenlager had recognised that its stores and online retail had to correspond more closely with each other. As part of the consulting work, dotSource first analysed the status quo of the company and combined this with a market and competition analysis as well as an analysis of the furniture retailer’s target group.

In a further step, an omnichannel digital strategy was developed together with the client: This means that in joint workshops around 30 MVPs were isolated, prioritised and put into a roadmap as part of the consulting process.

Amongst other things, the local IT system architecture was analysed and recommendations for action were made in order to improve the cooperation between stores and the head office in Flensburg. With regard to the omnichannel claim, an evaluation of the e-commerce system in particular was suggested and the introduction of a product data information system (PIM system for short) was addressed in order to replace the existing Lotus Domino system with more efficient and more agile software structures.

Success & Added Values

At the end of the cooperation, dotSource succeeded in identifying optimisation needs and, together with the client, not only managed to identify the most important points, but also to put the next steps into a concrete roadmap.

Equipped with these recommendations for action, Dänisches Bettenlager was able to start into a digital, customer-oriented future and to modernise its claim to offer quality yet affordable everyday products to millions of customers – throughout all channels.