How Blåkläder built a B2B experience that works like a B2C shop. 

Blåkläder is a Swedish workwear brand serving professionals across construction, industry, crafts and services, with a total revenue of SEK 3 billion.

Challenge

Blåkläder case 1

As a global B2B business, selling to distributors, dealers and direct customers across 23 international markets, Blåkläder recognised early that B2B buyers increasingly expect the same experience they enjoy as consumers.

When Christian Andersson took on the role of Ecommerce Manager, Blåkläder's online business was still in its early stages. Onboarding a new customer could take weeks of manual work. Scaling that process across 20,000 business accounts and multiple markets required a different foundation.

The underlying challenge was complexity. Blåkläder's B2B model involves thousands of business accounts, each with their own pricing agreements, roles and permissions. Distributors, dealers, direct customers and dropshipping setups all coexist across markets. Serving that range of customers online, while making the buying experience as simple as a B2C shop, required a commerce engine that could handle relational business logic at scale.

"Norce is our backbone. It keeps track of markets, customers, roles, pricing agreements and permissions. There is never any question about what applies for a specific customer online. That clarity is a real strength when you have over 20,000 business accounts."

Christian Andersson, Ecommerce Manager at Blåkläder.

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Action

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Blåkläder chose Norce Commerce as the foundation for their online business. Norce Commerce acts as the central commerce engine, managing customer accounts, pricing agreements, roles, permissions and market configurations across the business.

"Norce is our backbone. It keeps track of markets, customers, roles, pricing agreements and permissions. There is never any question about what applies for a specific customer online. That clarity is a real strength when you have over 20,000 business accounts," says Christian Andersson, Ecommerce Manager at Blåkläder.

Every business customer gets a buying experience tailored to their specific needs, with the right products, pricing and permissions, without the need for custom development. Norce's configurable data model allows Blåkläder to manage this complexity through configuration rather than code. Combinations of company-level settings allow them to tailor each customer's buying experience at scale. The result is a B2B portal that works like a B2C shop.

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"Our philosophy has always been that B2B commerce should work exactly like a consumer shop," Christian continues. "Same experience, same simplicity. That way, even employees at large customer organisations can start ordering without any training."

Norce also acts as a middleware layer between the business and Blåkläder's ERP, handling payments, order flows and commercial logic that would otherwise burden the core business system. When Blåkläder went through a major ERP migration, Norce remained stable throughout. Their online customers never noticed the switch.

Blåkläder's tech stack:

  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations as ERP
  • WordPress as CMS
  • Klevu for search
  • Adyen for payments
  • Centiro for logistics
  • Brainforest as frontend/solution partner

"Our philosophy has always been that B2B commerce should work exactly like a consumer shop. Same experience, same simplicity. That way, even employees at large customer organisations can start ordering without any training."

"Our largest customers wanted this, and it became a success story. It says something about how people want to buy when it's easy."

Christian Andersson, Ecommerce Manager at Blåkläder.

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Impact

Many B2B companies still treat ecommerce as a secondary channel. Buyers are expected to call sales reps, send emails or navigate outdated portals. Meanwhile, those same buyers shop effortlessly as consumers every day and increasingly expect the same from their professional suppliers.

Blåkläder understood this early. When Christian Andersson began building the ecommerce business, online sales accounted for roughly 5% of revenue. Today, ecommerce accounts for 45% of total sales, with more than 20,000 active customer accounts and around 31,000 web orders processed every month. Total revenue has grown from under SEK 500 million to SEK 3 billion, with digital commerce becoming a key growth engine.

That growth was driven by meeting a demand that was already there. Customers wanted to buy digitally, they just needed a B2B experience that actually worked for them.

"Our largest customers wanted this, and it became a success story," says Christian. "It says something about how people want to buy when it's easy."

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Blåkläder already has a widespread international presence, and when expanding to new markets, digital commerce is often the first point of entry, generating revenue that would not have existed through offline channels alone.

The administrative gains have been equally significant. What once required weeks of manual setup per customer is now handled through configuration in a few hours. A team of around 10 people manages the entire ecommerce operation across 23 markets, with new customer accounts going live with the right pricing, permissions and product access from day one.

Looking ahead, Blåkläder is building a B2B outlet function for distributors and dealers and exploring agentic commerce and AI-driven ordering, where Norce's data model and API architecture could play a central role. The goal is to continue growing the ecommerce share by 2 to 3 percentage points per year.