Henkle, a German holding with almost 150 years of history, and VTEX, the global enterprise digital commerce platform for premier brands and retailers, have entirely transformed the B2B sales system of Henkel’s salon-exclusive brand.
As part of the process, Indola has implemented a new sales channel and launched its multi-distributor marketplace in Spain and Portugal (shop.indola.es), which streamlines business transactions among its professional hairdressing customers and supports inventory management for approximately 280 SKUs of products.
According to Gartner, about 83% of B2B buyers prefer to place orders and make payments online, which also enhances the user experience. The B2B platform’s marketplace model not only boosts seller orders but also provides them with a level of digital visibility that would typically be challenging to attain without the resources this platform offers. “Our marketplace seamlessly integrates our trusted distributors as sellers, maintaining our proven business model. Every order is swiftly transferred from the marketplace directly to our distributors, ensuring efficient fulfillment and shipping for a seamless customer experience. We have also launched another tool that enables our team of distributors and sales associates to capture new digital natives, and —at the same time— we have digitized the brand with new sales channels,” explains Paula Llanet, ecommerce manager at Indola Professional.
To kickstart this project, Henkel had to embrace a novel approach to conducting business transactions. Indola’s marketplace has been meticulously crafted to enhance traditional sales models by leveraging cutting-edge digital tools and innovative technologies, amplifying their efficiency. “Here at Indola, the marketplace reinforces our trust in our business model while ensuring that technology provides further support in our day-to-day lives.”
Our core message has always been connected to commercial support. Even though it is true that physical and traditional channels have limited reach in specific scenarios, Indola has managed to fulfill the unmet demand and has supported and streamlined processes that exceeded stores’ capacities.
Finally, end users consider that customers’ trust in the product brand is a crucial factor. Indola is a benchmark in the professional hair salon market, and its top-selling products are related to PCC coloring, with vegan dyes and tints, and innovative technology.
“As digital commerce specialists, we understand the needs of both our B2B and B2C clients. We are delighted with Henkel’s improvement after implementing VTEX IO. We know we can provide them with the tools the company needs to continue growing,” explains Prakash Gurumoorthy, general manager at VTEX EMEA & APAC.
VTEX, which was recently nominated by Gartner as “one of the best platforms for managing B2B and B2C digital commerce on the same platform”, was chosen by Henkel to achieve this goal.
“I am sure our upgrade with VTEX has benefited us as clients. The platform is intuitive and user-friendly and enables us to introduce changes and customize the store to our needs even without any know-how,” Paula explains.
Indola, through its differentiating business model, was seeking to leverage the momentum, so it set into motion the search for software that would meet the following requirements:
– B2B ecommerce model to expand the sales model to other companies and professional hairdressers.
– Marketplace model. In this scenario, sales associates took the initiative to personally fulfill and deliver orders, moving away from the reliance on a single centralized warehouse for their products.
– Preserve corporate know-how, client portfolio, and distributor experience. These were the first components to be digitalized and were included in the process from the very beginning.
– Development support. To make Indola’s unique business model thrive online with minimal time-to-market delays, it’s essential to have the vendor’s specialized team on hand to help us tailor and fine-tune the platform to our needs.
– Scalability. Being able to drive growth without any technical knowledge on how to increase operation volume. More distributors’ sales were critical to this project’s success. We needed a platform that could support that expansion without hassle.
Despite the large number of sales associates within this new marketplace, their administrative barriers, and the configuration of each of those sellers, the new channel was launched just four months after its implementation. As of today, it has caught a growing interest of customers.
