Our cases

Nederlandse Loterij (NLO) is the leading player in the Dutch lottery market, with brands such as Staatsloterij, Lotto, Krasloten, and TOTO sportsbetting. To maintain its leading position and prepare for new opportunities and changes in the market, NLO wanted to restructure its organisation and redesign its way of working to be more customer focused, agile, and data driven.

Independer is the leading comparison website and online broker for financial products in the Netherlands. Founded in 1999 to improve the financial industry and support consumers in their decision-making process, it now enables consumers to compare prices and T&C on a range of insurance and financial products, including car insurances, health insurances and mortgages. Aiming to further accelerate growth, Independer identified next-level CRM as a key opportunity.

Sligro is a food wholesaler, providing both food service and food retail with a total revenue of nearly €3bln in 2017. Sligro asked SparkOptimus to help them identify digital growth opportunities for the group. The opportunities were both transformational and disruptive and included Sligro’s B2B and B2C activities.

HEMA is a value for money retailer known as one of the strongest brand in the Netherlands. Over the years, it expanded to over 700 stores in 7 countries. HEMA has a clear ambition to continue to grow both online and offline. To achieve this growth in omnichannel sales HEMA asked SparkOptimus to help develop a comprehensive 3-year plan, which met the ambitions set for the future. Subsequently, they asked SparkOptimus to implement this plan.

Wehkamp is a Dutch e-commerce player offering assortment in categories fashion, living, baby and beauty and more for families in the Netherlands. To offer a great customer experience & continuously improve, Wehkamp wanted to complete its transformation towards a truly digital organization with a focused effort in their Buying & Sales (B&S) discipline. As the Buying & Sales discipline forms Wehkamp’s heartbeat the transformation included a step change in multidisciplinary cooperation across the organization, next to upgrading digital category management practices with data-drive insights & actions.

Funda is the leading platform for private real estate in The Netherlands and the most visited home mover website in the Dutch market with over 3.4M visitors per month. To maintain this position and grow into new opportunities, Funda asked SparkOptimus to develop a new Digital Strategy.

De Bijenkorf wanted to offer consumers premium services such as personalization via its new service program Privilege Membership. To be able to offer this program new solutions, technology, processes and data capture methods needed to be identified and implemented in the organization.

AkzoNobel UK Deco is the leading player in the UK decorative paint market, and forms part of the global paint, coatings, and chemical producer AkzoNobel. As digital developments are accelerating, AkzoNobel UK Deco asked SparkOptimus to support in defining an integrated digital commerce strategy.

After launching in 2009, Treatwell set out to transform the booking process of an industry that for years relied on pen, paper, and telephone: the hair & beauty market. In a matter of years, the company quickly grew its footprint to become Europe’s leading online platform for booking beauty & wellbeing services. After having completed a global rebrand in 2016, management considered optimizing & harmonizing its salon pricing model a top priority to scale its business to the next level.

The Kraft Heinz Company is one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. Names like Heinz and Jell-o belong to its large portfolio of internationally popular food brands.

To serve its consumers and customers better digitally, Kraft Heinz asked SparkOptimus for help in achieving three main objectives: Design initiatives to boost digital sales across different routes to market; Identify eCommerce organizational and technology enablers at international level and in 3 representative markets (United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Brazil); define a roadmap to drive execution of the changes.

STADA is a global manufacturer of high-quality pharmaceuticals with 125 years of worldwide experience in consumer healthcare. With their vitamin and mineral supplements business growing rapidly online, and competition increasing strongly, STADA asked us to provide hands-on support to accelerate their sales on Amazon and upskill their own team in the process.

The overall objective of a digital due diligence is to provide a perspective on the value of a potential acquisition, its risks, and its opportunities. Typically, three types of clients request digital due diligences: a seller, a strategic buyer, or an independent investor. This case focuses on a typical ‘buying side’ digital due diligence.

ABN AMRO Verzekeringen (AAV) is a joint venture of ABN AMRO Bank (AAB) and Nationale Nederlanden (NN). AAV is dedicated to serving the insurance needs of AAB customers (businesses and consumers) and has a unique position in the market as both an insurer and a broker. Foreseeing rapid changes in the market, AAV asked SparkOptimus to help redefine its strategic position to achieve sustainable customer growth in the future.

Royal Auping is the leading producer and brand for sleep comfort in the Benelux. The omnichannel customer journey was a key pillar in their future strategy. Auping asked SparkOptimus to support them in making its omnichannel strategy and transition plan towards its digital ambitions concrete.

Achmea is the largest insurance company in the Netherlands. It provides health, casualty, and income insurance to over 10M individuals through its brands such as Centraal Beheer and Interpolis. Achmea’s Casualty Insurance division has set its ambition to become a digital and data-driven insurer and installed a team to lead this transformation; the Data & Digital Team. This team explores and tests new business models, redesigns customer journeys, and digitizes and automates internal processes. Over the course of 2019, 2020 and 2021, Achmea has collaborated with SparkOptimus in multiple focused stints to set up the Data & Digital Team, build up its capabilities and realize impact in its customer journeys.

ECI is one of the oldest Dutch online book stores. After a restart in early 2014, ECI rebuilt its core business processes and organizational foundation and was ready for the next step. They asked us to define a minimum viable product (MVP) for its new proposition and support the MVP implementation and launch of this new proposition.

Gamma Belgium is a top 3 player in the Belgian DIY market. Every week 160,000 customers shop at one of 80+ stores in Flanders or Wallonia. As part of the Intergamma cross-channel strategy, Gamma Belgium launched their webshop in early 2014. SparkOptimus was asked to help build an adaptive and self-learning e-commerce organization with a constant focus on growth and profit maximization.

Emesa (VakantieVeilingen.nl) had been growing at a tremendous pace over the last few years. Leaving the start-up years behind, the shareholder and its management felt a new level of strategic focus and professionalization of its structure and processes was key to ignite the next phase of significant growth.

The partners of the Air Miles loyalty program: Shell, Ahold, V&D and Praxis, acknowledged the fact that the joint program was not in line with modern standards. They wanted to redesign the program so that it would increase engagement with their customers, make use of the data and insights to run their business, and ensure a setup that would benefit all partners in their business.

PortXchange reduces inefficiencies in the port-calling process, by making key planning data available and transparent to all players in the value chain with their digital solution. To scale and drive adoption, PortXchange asked SparkOptimus to define its first revenue and pricing model to suit all port-calling customers.