We have decided to change the direction of being a gifting marketplace to a marketplace focusing on Norwegian quality products. We want to gather smaller Norwegian brands and businesses together to strengthen their position against the larger corporations. We need to make it easier to find and buy good Norwegian local products as well as trying to change consumers buying behavior step by step. From the mall to Glimty to support the smaller ones. If we want to keep the uniqueness and variety of our market within our borders, we need to act now.Glimty - Something Norwegian.
We started Glimty because we saw that during the last couple of years having an online store has become more of a nuisance than an advantage to many businesses. Each of these new stores simply makes the ecommerce space even more crowded for local, well-crafted and original products. Furthermore, online stores are becoming difficult to navigate and currently have very low conversion rates. Our solution takes on the challenge of improving the customer experience of existing online stores and marketplaces to the level of personalization only provided by a visit to an actual physical store. We have built the best solution in the market to guarantee that the customer receives online assistance from a semi-automated digital clerk resulting in a higher conversion rate and potential recurring customers.We have partnered with a number of independent and small Norwegian retailers and Norwegian made products/Services as we want to give these companies a voice and a chance to compete with the larger brands and companies that saturate the market due to their huge marketing budgets. We provide an increased likelihood of a customer to purchase one of our partner’s products as every interaction occurs through one-on-one conversations when the user is already in the mindset of making a purchase of a gift. We also offer their products in personalized collections. They obtain a commercialization channel totally focused on the shopping experience of the customer. The benefits of being featured in our store, blog or chatbot describing the characteristics of the products increases their marketing reach, obtaining customers that discover these products whilst in the mindset of buying gifts. Daniel and James met each other 2 years ago and have been studying many frameworks and theories of entrepreneurship and innovation throughout their master studies at University of Oslo. Being students we started with little and so we had to rely on our ability to adapt to any situation by implementing and recombining our resources in an innovative way, in particular through our connections and networks. The gifting aspect is just the first phase and a method for introducing the Chatbot Technology into the Norwegian market. This approach also came from the experience that our CEO, Susanne Wesner, obtained by founding a company in 2015 and suffering first hand the struggle of building a business relying solely on an ecommerce store as a source of revenue. Daniel built that first version of an automated customer assistance system for Susanne’s business, and with feedback and work from Susanne and James, the team continued developing the solution towards the technology that Glimty is introducing to the market.