Fargerike

The Challenge

When you walk into a Fargerike store, you expect to meet skilled professionals ready to guide you. As a specialty retailer, the combination of expertise and quality products is one of Fargerike’s strongest competitive advantages. This advisory service had to be digitized in a smart way to meet growing customer expectations and needs.

Fargerike wanted customers to experience the same level of service and expertise across every channel – in-store, on the phone, in chat, or online.

How do you make this expertise digital?

Focus on colors

The solution was to focus on selling colors rather than just paint buckets. As a specialty retailer, Fargerike needed to understand how they could help customers achieve the results they wanted at home, rather than focusing only on how many liters of paint a project required.

• Few players have done this online, and it is highly complex – involving logistics, product data, and relationships. Color expertise is intricate, so we built a dedicated color PIM to handle this in the best possible way, explains Guy Markussen, Business Advisor at Epinova.

To meet customer expectations, Fargerike carried out a major lift with a comprehensive omnichannel project. The goal was to create a seamless solution where systems communicate across both online and in-store environments.

More than just an e-commerce project

The process was divided into two phases. Phase one launched e-commerce with home delivery, connected only to the central warehouse. Phase two added “click and collect,” connecting the system to inventory at individual stores. It was important that this solution also communicated with store staff, so customers could still receive professional guidance when picking up their orders and even add extra items before payment.

Technology Choices

Most systems were affected by this project: POS, PIM, customer service, ERP, and e-commerce – everything had to communicate. Only then could they provide customers with a truly channel-independent and holistic service.

• The most challenging part was the sheer number of integrations needed for launch. Many new APIs had to be learned and implemented, and we had to coordinate with a wide range of people, says Jørgen Helgheim, Backend Developer at Epinova.

Many of Fargerike’s products can’t just be dropped into a shopping cart. Buying paint requires several steps.

• We built a guided tool where customers answer key questions: Am I painting indoors or outdoors? Which gloss level do I need? What surface am I painting on? How many liters will it take to cover the room? These wizards are written in React, with Redux handling the state management. As a frontend developer, that gives me precise control of what is displayed at any time, and much of the logic can run on the client side, says Michael Arvanitidis, Frontend Developer on the project.

Collaboration

The project was carried out in partnership with Northern Beat and Inmeta.