Leolux and iO — elegant digital product and brand experiences

iO and Pode, part of the Leolux Furniture Group

iO and Pode, part of the Leolux Furniture Group, had already enjoyed a successful collaboration that resulted in the production of a high end, design conscious product experience website. Our work with Pode made the deficiencies and limitations of the Leolux website more visible.

The Leolux website was slow to load and lacked essential components to facilitate the proper presentation of a contemporary product experience website.

Leolux are an established name in the European furniture market and have been producing quality furniture in the Netherlands since 1934. Leolux Furniture Group is a Dutch family company that develops, produces, and sells designer furniture to order. For people worldwide, with their own wishes and ideas about interiors and living. Leolux Furniture Group includes the brands Leolux, Pode, Évidence, and Leolux LX.

Before the collaboration with iO, Leolux was focused on the 45+ audience, but analysis of recent societal shifts revealed that there was an unexplored audience for Leolux products. In order to attract the wealthy 30+ age group to the Leolux brand, it was essential to upgrade the website and ensure that the brand was presented consistently across platforms, because their existing digital products did not share Leolux’s values.

Challenge

To expand Leolux’s target market with a consistent, upgraded online presence.

Solution

A custom-built, adaptive, accessible, and highly visual product experience website.

Because of the technical demands of developing the multi-domain/multi-language Leolux.com website, and in order to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, iO and the Leolux team worked with three developers and a designer in eight two-week sprint cycles. Delivering iterative optimisations meant that the Leolux team and iO could see the ongoing progress. This increased productivity and the effectiveness of our communication, focused our collaboration as we developed the functional components.

Although the available budget and time were not as generous as we had first anticipated, we were able to deliver an elegant product experience website, in four languages across six domains in Storyblok CMS. This gave Leolux a platform to present their values and brand identity fluently and consistently on every platform, and every device.

We built the Leolux application using NextJS (a React Library) and made a data communication layer with Apollo GraphQL, using the TypeScript language.

We delivered a high-end product experience website for Leolux that aligns with their design philosophy, while presenting the expanded target audience with the Leolux product range and a clear and intuitive dealer locator with domain/language component customisability in Storyblok. We wrote the code and setup the Storyblok CMS so that Leolux can decide what features or pages to exclude/include in every individual language/domain. This means is that they only need to create one page that they can customise and control what parts of the page are displayed in every domain and/or language. Leolux have complete control in the CMS and can build the pages they need on a domain or language level without having to duplicate pages as a whole.

Today, Leolux website visitors can select and configure products across the Leolux range to their heart’s desires. Access to Leolux is effortless, there is a comprehensive and interactive list of dealers, and they can even order material samples and colour swatches for free home delivery.

“Leolux has taken the next step in optimising its brand identity in several areas this year. Creating a new high-end digital brand experience that perfectly matched our brand is a task we confidently entrusted to iO. Following the previous experience — the launch of the new Pode website — the whole process once again went very smoothly. We had high requirements in terms of quality and technology, but iO delivered beyond expectations. Whatever the future of Leolux may bring, with iO we go into it with great confidence.”