When Lori McDonald’s company, Brilliance Business Solutions, acquired Norsland Lefse, she knew it wanted to refresh its ecommerce platform. The Minnesota-based business, which sells Scandinavian food products online, had a unique offering and room to grow.

Along the way, the first year of operating Norsland Lefse gave McDonald new insights into some of the issues her Brilliance Clients encounter every day.

Reflecting on Norsland Lefse’s first year under Brilliance, McDonald shared a few of those lessons and how that year prepared her for 2025.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Click here to read the first part of our interview with Lori McDonald.

What it has been like operating Norsland Lefse

Lori McDonald, president and CEO at Brilliance Business Solutions | Image credit: Brilliance Business Solutions

DC360: You had your short checklist for what you wanted to be able to serve and do for folks that you were marketing to as soon as you started expanding, right?

LM: Exactly. And so our goal was to get ourselves on a foundation that we can continually improve on over time, not necessarily to see all of the benefit right away. And so that’s what we’ve been able to do.

As an example, the previous site on Wix didn’t have product reviews available [and] didn’t have a site search. Some really small, basic things. So right now when we went live with the new site, we are still using the out-of-the-box site search from BigCommerce, the out-of-the-box reviews — and yet those things are a major win over the nothing we had before.

DC360: Can you speak to any of the results you’ve seen from those changes so far?

LM: Absolutely, yeah. Over the last year, we’ve seen a 62% improvement in our mobile conversion rate.

Here’s the funny story. We grew demand; we grew sales via digital. That worked. We ran ourselves out of inventory in our busy season. Before we ran out of inventory, we had doubled our sales on BigCommerce year over year, which is great.

DC360: Now, when you say your busiest season, is that the holidays?

LM: Yeah, Q4 is that. Everyone wants lefse at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So that’s like my lesson learned. I know digital well. I don’t know manufacturing as well. And so we had a lot of equipment breakdowns that happened. And we’ve been making some investments in equipment that helps us to improve our capacity for this next year.

But what was interesting, too, is that digital provided some opportunities for us to ensure we were communicating with people well when we were low on inventory. We had an online wait list that we [used for] emailing folks when things came back in stock.

We set up subscriptions so that people could — even though we didn’t have inventory — we could still allow people to buy a gift subscription of lefse for 2025 that they could give as a gift. So we were leveraging digital and how we solved for our inventory challenges as well.

Omnichannel options

DC360: Do you do pick up in store?

LM: We did some, but we found it to be difficult. It’s a small team, and there aren’t a lot of people in the local area.

We had buy online, pick up in store available as a feature for like two weeks, and then we found that some people were accidentally placing an order to pick up in store when they didn’t expect it to be — and so we just turned it off.

DC360: When you don’t have a nationwide presence, I can understand how that would happen.

LM: We also experimented with another feature where we had a request, a future delivery date. That actually was a big hit. A lot of people would use it because people often will buy lefse and want it for a future family gathering. But because our internal systems aren’t super sophisticated, it became really difficult for the internal team to manage — keeping track of all the orders. And so we ended up turning that off.

What Norsland Lefse sells

DC360: What are the most popular products as of right now?

LM: Lefse is a very popular product. We have a herring that is very popular. The lingonberry jam — or we have lingonberry syrups are very popular products. Those are the top ones.

DC360: I would think most people who have been into an Ikea probably recognize a handful of the things that they see through you.

LM: Yes. And certainly people do buy lutefisk. We have a lutefisk and lefse dinner. I think it may be in some instances because they can’t necessarily find it in other places — or to buy online — but yes.

Future ecommerce plans for Norsland Lefse

DC360: You mentioned the things you’ve done so far. What’s your dream list of things you’d like to be able to do from an ecommerce standpoint with the brand?

LM: One of our growth strategies for the business is to grow our wholesale business. So we’re working on expanding our B2B capabilities for the site in terms of our business customers being able to log in and order with their specific pricing.

Initially, we’re keeping that pretty simple. Over time, I would love to get to a point where we can be leveraging BigCommerce’s B2B edition with invoice payments and all of that. We’re looking at Balance to support different methods of payment from a B2B perspective online and automate automatic approval of credit terms for customers. Those are some things that would be very useful.

Things that help to save our customer service team time — because again, it’s a small team. So wherever we can create the opportunity for people to self-serve instead of having to call in, I would love.

Key takeaways for McDonald

DC360: What have you learned about ecommerce jumping into this side of the business from your work at Brilliance?

LM: I have learned so much. What’s interesting is we set out to do this because we were looking to learn. We were looking both to diversify how we make money, but also to learn what it’s like to be a customer and to use that learning to help improve the work we do at Brilliance.

And so I got to work on the client side with my team. One of the things that I learned is that at Brilliance when we’re working on a project for a customer we think what we’re doing for them is super important and must be something that takes a lot of mind share for them. They’re thinking about the work we’re doing, and what I realized is you’ve got so many other things you’re worried about. As a customer, you’ve got staffing issues, you’ve got inventory issues, you’ve got all this other stuff going on. And so it just really helped me to see the really great, good work our team does, but helped me to be aware of how our team went when it seems like, wow, “Why hasn’t a customer gotten back to us on XYZ?”

Probably, they’re dealing with their own set of things going on in their world, like if we can find time, ways to save our customers time, make our communication shorter, easier for them to consume, or figure out what they need to do next, that’s really what customers want.

Do you rank in our databases? 

Submit your data and we’ll see where you fit in our next ranking update.

Sign up

Stay on top of the latest developments in the ecommerce industry. Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 Retail News. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Be the first to know when Digital Commerce 360 publishes news content.