Maisons du Monde: Turning houses into homes, with omnichannel shopping experiences on Google Cloud
About Maisons du Monde
Founded in Brest in 1996, Maisons du Monde is a European leader in affordable and inspirational household decoration and furniture with a large selection of products for all budgets, sizes, and tastes. Customers can browse and purchase the vast range of in-house and external brands across 369 stores in nine countries, 12 ecommerce websites, and four catalogs.
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Contact usMaisons du Monde transitioned its whole IT infrastructure to Google Cloud and now uses real-time information flows and data feeds to augment its new omnichannel ecommerce platform.
Google Cloud results
- Delivers stable website performance, even with traffic peaks at 10x normal rate, with autoscaling on Google Kubernetes Engine
- Improves the shopping experience with speedier shipments, and optimizes stock flow with real-time stock visibility from Pub/Sub
- Facilitates launch of ecommerce marketplace, leveraging Google Cloud to double the range of products offered online
- Enables a seamless customer experience across digital and physical touchpoints with a single customer view
Handles 10x the traffic with Google Kubernetes Engine
What are furniture and decoration, if not inspiration for homes? As the backdrop to our daily lives, the objects that make our own homes special should be carefully selected to reflect our evolving tastes and needs.
With a vast selection of furniture and home decoration products, as well as one new furniture collection and two new decoration collections per year, French furniture company Maisons du Monde entices shoppers with the latest trends and styles and makes them affordable to all budgets. That’s why shoppers come back again and again, not just as customers, but as fans.
Maisons du Monde is international and omnichannel, with a network of 369 stores in nine countries, supported by an ecommerce platform in each country (as well as three additional countries). Its collections are accessible to shoppers according to their preferences, whether that’s browsing furniture in the store, ordering it online, or click-and-collect.
Personalizing the user experience with data
With around half of the company’s turnover spread across online sales and digital sales in store, Maisons du Monde is already at the forefront of the new, digital retail world. That reflects a wider business philosophy: “IT, data, and innovation is top of mind for us as a company,” explains Guillaume Apostoly, Chief Information Officer at Maisons du Monde. “Providing a great user experience both online and in store is key to our success as it’s the go-to market for our rich, inspirational, and unique product collections.”
To build brand loyalty with an integrated, targeted customer experience, Maisons du Monde moved its data services to Google Cloud back in 2017. Today, BigQuery and Cloud Storage serve as the company’s main data lake, collecting data across the company, including supply, stock, and store data. Data is orchestrated with Dataflow, and is interconnected in real time with the rest of IT through Pub/Sub.
With its unified data platform, Maisons du Monde has strengthened its cross-selling capabilities, e-merchandising, and search, with both in-house developments and third-party solution data feeds. By personalizing its marketing efforts, the company drives engagement with targeted campaigns, while avoiding retargeting customers with redundant ads.
“BigQuery is the foundation for every data-related decision we make,” explains Guillaume. “The simplicity and versatility of the solution enables us to make the same data available at every level of the company. From executive committee members using data visualisation tools daily, to supply teams optimizing demand forecast and supply chain, and to deeper SQL and machine learning analysis and activations (like predicting customer lifetime value) done in the Data team, everything is powered by Google Cloud.”
“In our old system, we used to integrate changes in time-consuming nightly batches, producing static reports that were quickly outdated. To build an infrastructure with real-time visibility for our omnichannel needs and improve our scalability, we decided to migrate to Google Cloud.”
—Guillaume Apostoly, Chief Information Officer, Maisons du MondeBuilding a global Google Cloud architecture
With the data architecture in place, Maisons du Monde decided to expand its cloud footprint by moving its infrastructure to Google Cloud as well. The company’s monolithic legacy systems stood in the way of Maisons du Monde’s digital omnichannel approach: “In our old system, we used to integrate changes in time-consuming nightly batches, producing static reports that were quickly outdated.“ says Guillaume. “We decided to get to the core of what information technology is. And thanks to Google Cloud, we built an infrastructure where Digital, Core, Data, and Supply can communicate in real time.”
After years of experience working with Google Cloud, Guillaume and his team have come to cherish the simplicity of the Google Cloud solutions. “We’ve had a great partnership with Google Cloud from the very beginning, which has led us to make great choices in the past,” says Guillaume. “Ease of use is key for us, and with Google Cloud, implementing Google Cloud solutions is simple even with a comparatively small infrastructure team. When people arrive at the company, they have a simple, efficient and scalable set of technology to play with.”
Maisons du Monde has been firmly committed to corporate social responsibility (CSR) for more than 10 years. It supports sustainable development across the board, both in the manufacture of its products and as a retailer. Its motto is “Committed together!”, and those two words encompass more than just environmental commitments. It is a rallying cry for solidarity too. That’s why the company gives its old hardware to local people and businesses and tries to use refurbished devices wherever possible.
Maisons du Monde’s partnership with Google has also strengthened their CSR strategy. It chose Google Chrome OS devices for its stores and headquarters because of their long term/low maintenance value. The partnership has also helped Maisons du Monde to reach the criteria for compliancy.
“During the lockdown in France, we suddenly had to face loads 10 times higher than our previous peak. In the past, with dedicated infrastructure, that simply wouldn’t have worked without expensive manual additions, but thanks to autoscaling with Google Kubernetes Engine, we’ve been able to perform as usual, at little additional cost.”
—Guillaume Apostoly, Chief Information Officer, Maisons du MondeHandling heavy traffic, automatically
Today, about 50% of Maisons du Monde’s digital services are hosted on Google Cloud, and Guillaume and his team are going cloud-first for all new workloads and systems. Development and production are mostly running on Google Kubernetes Engine. “Our core IT, and everything we build from here on out, we build either directly on Google Cloud, or with SaaS companies that communicate through our global Google Cloud architecture,” explains Guillaume. “We’ve got our core legacy systems yet to move, but Maisons du Monde’s architecture today is fully cloud compatible.”
The scalability of Maisons du Monde’s cloud setup was put to the test in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic required a temporary shutdown of physical stores, diverting even more traffic than usual to the company’s websites. Within three weeks, the IT team set up autoscaling with Google Kubernetes Engine, ensuring a stable ecommerce performance regardless of the traffic.
“During the lockdown in France, we suddenly had to face loads 10 times higher than our previous peak,” says Guillaume. “In the past, with dedicated infrastructure, that simply wouldn’t have worked without expensive new hardware that takes a long time to set up, but thanks to autoscaling with Google Kubernetes Engine, we’ve been able to perform just as usual, at little additional cost.”
Giving customers a seamless shopping experience
As the connecting tissue for Maisons du Monde’s omnichannel strategy, Pub/Sub facilitates a global information system with a single source of truth. By ensuring that information travels in real time between the company’s different channels and services, Guillaume and his team have been able to build a single customer view and real-time global warehouse and store stocks, improving the shopping experience.
In the past, when customers ordered products online, it could take up to nine hours for an order to travel to the warehouse management system, resulting in potential delays. It’s now down to minutes. Similarly, daily store sales used to be gathered in nightly batches, which could stretch into the following day, impacting restocking decisions. Today, all this information is provided in real time with Cloud Pub/Sub, ensuring faster shipments, improving replenishment decisions, and reducing the risk of out-of-stock items.
Moreover, the single customer view ensures that Maisons du Monde customers benefit from a seamless customer experience across touchpoints. If a customer creates an account online, the data is transferred in real time to the point of sale database. If they’re in a Maisons du Monde store and contact the call center just minutes later, they’re already recognized. Want to buy additional products? Coming to pick up your click and collect ? Information is up to date everywhere.
“Cloud Pub/Sub really holds our entire omnichannel strategy together, enabling us to make smart business decisions with real-time information, and provide seamless customer experiences,” says Guillaume.
New marketplace, bigger product range
In late 2020, real-time visibility into stock and customer data became more important than ever before, when Maisons du Monde launched its new marketplace with Mirakl in France. By extending its in-house selection with more than 25,000 furniture products from more than 200 external brands, Maisons du Monde significantly expanded its range, offering customers more selection.
The switch wasn’t without challenge: whereas in the past, the range of products displayed online was relatively static with seasonal changes, the expanded selection of the new marketplace requires constant coordination with the suppliers. With the cloud infrastructure already in place, Guillaume and his team were ready to go:
“Google Cloud really drove the creation of our new platform,” says Guillaume. “We’ve essentially enriched our product range and are working with multiple suppliers whose products need to be always up to date on our website. To make all this possible, the scalability and real-time information flows of our Google Cloud infrastructure are crucial as everything is pipelined. A new product, a change of price or information is reflected almost immediately on the website.”
“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to build an IT infrastructure in which every element communicates with each other. We’re faster, more scalable, more collaborative, and deliver better user experiences than ever before. And with our new marketplace, we’re ready to start a new chapter in our omnichannel strategy.”
—Guillaume Apostoly, Chief Information Officer, Maisons du MondeStarting a new omnichannel chapter
With the new marketplace humming along, Guillaume and his team are ready to tackle new projects. While the company is fully cloud compatible, some legacy systems still remain. To accelerate their migration to the cloud, the team is looking into Google Cloud VMware Engine.
Further personalizing the customer experience is another priority. By tapping into the Google Cloud toolkit, and using tools like Recommendations AI or AutoML Vision APIs, Guillaume hopes to deliver even more relevant and inspirational content to each shopper, resulting in happier customers and higher sales, thanks to cross-selling or more targeted marketing campaigns.
“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to build an IT infrastructure in which every element communicates with each other,” says Guillaume. “We’re faster, more scalable, more collaborative, and deliver better user experiences than ever before. And with our new marketplace, we’re ready to start a new chapter in our omnichannel strategy.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Maisons du Monde
Founded in Brest in 1996, Maisons du Monde is a European leader in affordable and inspirational household decoration and furniture with a large selection of products for all budgets, sizes, and tastes. Customers can browse and purchase the vast range of in-house and external brands across 369 stores in nine countries, 12 ecommerce websites, and four catalogs.