RAJA's history is one of constant pioneering: This renowned packaging materials wholesaler was founded by two women – Rachel Marcovici and Janine Rocher – in 1954 when women were not even allowed to have their own bank accounts in France. And to top it all, these two magnificent entrepreneurs decided to start their business in perhaps one of the worst possible scenarios: post-WWII France, where scarcity and precarity were a daily occurrence.
But their ingenuity and courage made them successful whereas many others failed. And this success was in great part to Rachel visionary business approach. For example, they chose to work with a circular economy approach before that even existed, using second-hand products to alleviate the scarcity of ravaged post-war Europe, and decided that customer-centric commitment had to be part of RAJA DNA.
This entrepreneurial, visionary, and courageous DNA has been part of RAJA until today: They were the first company to offer mail-order packaging products via catalog in France and one of the first companies in their industry to launch an online e-commerce and e-procurement solution in 2000.
And it paid off: RAJA currently has 26 companies, and the RAJA Group is now present in 19 European countries; it accounts for over 4,500 employees and a sales volume of over €1,7 billion and is positioned as the top European distributor of business supplies and equipment.
That’s why, we had the pleasure of speaking with Antoine Laffond, Head of Digital & E-Commerce at RAJA, to examine RAJA's success story in dealing with e-commerce and e-procurement, why it chose Intershop as a B2B e-commerce platform, what challenges it faced, how Intershop helped them overcome these challenges, and above all, what lessons we can learn from this successful combination of RAJA DNA and Intershop functionalities.
Intershop as a solid base to build for the future
The main reason why RAJA opted for Intershop was that Intershop provided a rock-solid B2B specialized e-commerce platform. Something that the company considered fundamental, as it provided RAJA with a core solution that was already, out of the box, capable of delivering most of their specific B2B needs.
Let’s talk a bit about the thought process behind RAJA's expansion into B2B e-commerce, what RAJA was searching for in its online solution, and why you chose Intershop?
Antoine: RAJA experienced massive growth as a company, and thus, we needed something that was scalable and reliable. Also, RAJA has different verticals across the company. We have the office supply vertical, the packaging vertical, and the industrial vertical.
At the same time, we asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to offer the same customer experience in all of our verticals?’ and ‘How many specificities do we need to tackle?’. To answer this, we went to our core. In our core business, we are fundamentally a B2B company. That’s why Intershop made so much sense for us; it is the best B2B platform, ‘out-of-the-box,’ for B2B companies wishing to go online.
Intershop offers many features for our B2B customers, including many specific features that you can’t find out of the box in other solutions. This is why we decided to trust Intershop and have stayed with it.
However, Intershop provides a strong base for B2B e-commerce and has allowed us to build upon it to improve with features that allow us to cater to our different verticals' specific needs.
Which features did Intershop provide to RAJA?
Antoine: The main features we were searching for with Intershop were first related to procurement acceleration. Intershop is open by design to complex organizations and B2B workflows, which is vital because B2B e-commerce is rich and complex in matters such as different types of invoicing or approval basket workflows, for example.
And those kinds of basic but very B2B-specific features – Intershop already has them by design and can be greatly improved very easily.
For us at RAJA, the customer must be in the middle of everything; it is our center. We don't want to deliver a customer experience that you can find everywhere; and we want to deliver a customer experience that has our DNA and spirit embedded in it. We want our customers to feel that RAJA is there for them, always.
And this high-quality customer experience needs to happen all across our international markets, no matter if you are in France or if you are in Portugal; if you are buying from any of the RAJA group of companies, we want you to have the same high-quality customer experience.
Intershop is also part of our growth strategy of acquisition, organic growth, and having as many touch points as possible with our customers. And precisely for this, in the future, we believe that e-commerce will be increasingly prevalent as a main touch point with our customers. So much so that we want to move all of our companies to work under the same core e-commerce and e-procurement solution, which means with Intershop.
An omnichannel and customer-centric approach
Taking over the company's leadership in 1982 at 36, Danièle Kapel-Marcovici, the daughter of RAJA founder Rachel Marcovici, proved once again that the brand was brave, courageous, and visionary.
She gave structure to the organization, made the catalog the primary driver of sales, and enlarged the Gonesse warehouse in Val d’Oise to ultimately achieve one of the main objectives of her sales policy: to provide delivery anywhere in France in 24/48 hours and become the national leader in packaging.
And the results were there! Revenues increased fivefold within ten years. In 1990, the company changed its name from “Cartons RAJA” to RAJA, reflecting its will to diversify, expanding the offering from packaging to include other product ranges.
Let’s talk a bit about the complexity of B2B commerce and what kind of approach you are following?
Antoine: In the online RAJA, the customer is at the center. For us, the customer is everything. So, no matter the channel, we need the customer to be the center of the experience. To achieve this, our approach has been to have a very strong in-house team that is fully committed to providing and creating the best online experience for our customers.
From the UX to the development, our goal is for our online customers to get a high-quality RAJA customer journey experience. So much so that we want all of our businesses to be under the same core model with Intershop. For example, Viking, currently producing over 90% of the revenues online, will be moved to this core model. We want unity in our customer experience.
In terms of technical approach, we have begun a migration to a MACH architecture: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-Native, and Headless.
Remember that RAJA has a complex spectrum of products with over 25,000 SKUs. So, our digital distribution channels also benefit from this seamless interface because the way in which an order is received by RAJA is not determined by the technology but by the needs of the customers that can differ from small company to big corporation.
The spectrum ranges from online or telephone ordering, the customer’s online shopping cart, e-mails, the personal account manager on-site to the customer’s ERP system, which can be directly integrated into RAJA thanks to EDI flows.
What would you say has been Intershop's main advantage for RAJA?
Antoine: Centralizing all of our customers' data is vital for us. We don’t want a customer who is ordering offline to be unable to retrieve or interact with his orders online. We want online and offline connected.
For few years now, we have been providing our marketing and sales teams with the customer's information all the time, regardless of whether this customer is an online or offline customer.
Our objective is to know exactly what the customer did, online or offline, and give the marketing teams access to activate a customized strategy. This could be done via email or phone, but we want the marketing team to create this personalized customer journey for all our customers.
This is important for RAJA. For other companies, this personalization is done via marketing automation, but as soon as you land on the website, it is the same website for everybody. We don’t do that. We offer full customization end-to-end. So, when our customers land on the website, our website presents a personalized product discovery and customer journey for each one of them.
We are doing this using Intershop as a core and adding our own functionalities to it. From an omnichannel perspective, we do not stop at the shop's door; we use data-driven segmentation to provide customers with personalized journeys.
Our main lesson here is that it is good to centralize the data, but it is also vital to have easy access to this data, to be able to extract it and work with it easily across multiple teams inside a complex organizational structure.
Can we mention some KPIs that show how Intershop has provided solutions for RAJA?
Antoine: It is a bit difficult to mention specific KPIs, as this is a very large, very complex B2B operation with many teams involved, and to say ‘this is the exclusive success of this team or the other’ is not true.
But I can tell you that Intershop has improved in all the KPIs we measure. We are talking about revenue and conversion rate per source in all channels and sources, as well as UX, customer journey, and customer satisfaction, which are vital for us.
In the end, when you look at new customer acquisitions, 93% of our customers are coming from online. The same is true for web share; 65% of the turnover is currently done online.
When our customers go to the web, they stay on the web. Our customers really appreciate the web service, as it allows them to find everything online easily: tracking orders, invoices, purchase history, etc.
In fact, two years ago, we launched the UMUX (Usability Metric for User Experience) KPI to measure the usability of our web, and we had excellent results so far.
We know the Intershop implementation was done via their partner DATASOLUTION. Can you tell us more about this?
Antoine: When your company is, at its core, a family business that cherishes entrepreneurial values, it is easy to connect with other entrepreneurs. At the time, we were searching for an implementation partner, and we were approached by many big companies, but DATASOLUTION had the same spirit of entrepreneurship as we had.
We liked that DATASOLUTION was pragmatic, really business-oriented, and above all, it showed true and honest commitment to us. It was pretty easy to work with them because they pursue problem-solving and incremental value approaches. We still work with them, so it has been a very happy alliance.
If I had to highlight one thing about our partnership with DATASOLUTION, it was that when we acquired JPG, Bernard, Mondoffice, and Kalamazoo, we had a 12-month deadline to migrate these four e-commerce activities to the Intershop core model. So, it was pretty complex, and it happened during the COVID crisis. It was nearly an impossible mission.
But we developed such a unity between DATASOLUTION, Ahead Digital – our partner for design and the digital transformation – and RAJA that we could do it in 12 months, create new responsive designs, migrate all the customers, and be operational before the deadline. It was a real challenge because we were also extending our core model to a new vertical - office supplies - that we had never worked on before. So, many things had to be added for this vertical, that were new for us in general. It was a great success.
Growing globally and reading for an online future
Once again, a pioneer, Danièle Kapel-Marcovici conquered Europe with a multichannel sales strategy that gradually combined the company's field sales forces, customer service center sales teams working the phones, catalogs, and, since the year 2000, its e-commerce sites.
To achieve this, RAJA based its core e-commerce solution on Intershop and had DATASOLUTION as its implementation partner. Afterward, RAJA kept on growing through vital acquisitions such as the ones of JPG, Bernard, Mondoffice, Kalamazoo, Viking, and recently RETIF.
But what lays further down the road for RAJA now that they have become an EU-leading organization? The answer again is directly connected with their utmost commitment to their customers.
Could you please elaborate on a timeline and strategic map of RAJA's European expansion?
Antoine: In 1994, RAJA acquired Binpac in Belgium, which served as a springboard for its international growth. Business operations were launched in the Netherlands in 1997, followed by Germany (1999), Spain (2003), Austria (2004), Italy (2006), the Czech Republic (2007), Switzerland (in 2008), Denmark (2010) and Sweden (2012). In 2016, operations began in Slovakia and Portugal, and 2021 in Hungary.
Through business creations and acquisitions, the Group has become Europe’s largest packaging distributor while diversifying its activities to include warehouse equipment, janitorial and sanitary supplies, office supplies and furniture, personal protective items, and a range of retail store equipment.
One of the main ideas behind RAJA's success is expressed in the catalog created by Danièle Kapel-Marcovici: to be where the customer is, to provide customer-centric support, and to be a partner, not only a provider or wholesaler but a real partner who is there at your side supporting your business at every step.
And this concept is precisely what we wanted to translate into our e-commerce and e-procurement solutions. To create a solution that is able to provide localized and customized support and cater to the specific needs of each of our customers, regardless of their size or region. A solution that allows RAJA to keep being that partner, that ally you have for all the packaging needs of your business.
How have you implemented this localization and customization?
Antoine: So, when you call RAJA France or when you contact RAJA France online, you will be greeted and supported by one of our staff members in France, the same thing in Germany, Spain and all the other regions in Europe where we operate.
This is so important for us because most of the brands that are working with RAJA have been working with us for the better part of the last 20 years.
In that same sense, the Intershop platform also allowed for the implementation of new payment options or a chat service in the portal – thanks to standardized interfaces based on the REST framework, continuous further development of the customer portal is possible without excellent project effort.
Besides leading labels, RAJA also has its own brand, which offers “quality at the best price” and is presented in the shop with the RAJA logo and dedicated catalogs. There are also catalogs specially designed for the needs of online sellers, which make it easier for this customer segment to protect and package sophisticated products optimally and, of course, personalize them with their own logos via our RAJA Print offer.
Which one would you consider the main challenge for RAJA currently?
Antoine: Handling, collecting, and learning to use data is a main challenge not only for us but for any company striving to be successful nowadays. Investing in data skills, not only data analysis but also data science will be the game changer for companies in the future. We have started a complete Generative AI opportunity study in partnership with Microsoft and are actually transforming our inner organization – HR, sales, marketing, e-commerce, legal – to reach operational excellence and create new innovating services for our customers.
Which one do you think is RAJA's biggest competitive advantage?
Antoine: Our customer experience and customer-centric approach. Our customers speak for themselves; over 50% of our customers have been with RAJA for over 20 years. This means we have partnered with businesses that have grown alongside us for over two decades.
Companies that have trusted us during their entire business life cycle and who appreciate our expertise as advisors and the quality of our products.
