How premium apparel brand Bogner built a smartphone learning system for its partners
February 2020
Bogner is a Bavarian family-owned brand that has always focused on the older generation in design. However, over time, the brand's audience began to get younger, and at the same time, the staff in the brand's stores became younger. It was necessary to create a new effective system for training trade specialists.
Previously, we did training for partners with the help of our sales managers, who are 100 days a year at the head office in Munich. In the rest of the time, they go to the shops of the partner network, including to conduct training. Of course, it was not possible to train our partners' employees in this way, so we made materials and sent them by mail.

«ut who reads presentations and flips through slides today, and what remains in the head after that? Of course it didn't work. We struggled making presentations. Then our partners tormented and leafed through the slides, but we had no understanding of what was really learned by them, and what was immediately forgotten.

And at the same time, despite all efforts, we had a request from the partners themselves, who did not receive the necessary information.

Prerequisites

It all started with a change of collections. Bogner is a Bavarian family brand with a rich history, which in design has always been focused on the older generation - from 45 to 65 years old, in Russia a little younger, but not much younger. And we started to face the fact that our customers in Europe became less active due to their age, which is why they make fewer purchases..

Therefore, we decided to rejuvenate the collection, to make the design more modern. And this affected not only the collections, but also the employees themselves: the team changed, the youth came. The average age of employees has dropped dramatically. Younger, more modern people began to work for partners and we needed to find an approach to them and the way of training that suits them.

Where are they now? In smartphones. Many do not even use a computer - everything is on the go, everything is in a smartphone. Our partners also realized that presentations, slides and face-to-face lectures were no longer an option and were expecting some kind of innovative, modern solution from us.

Why did you decide to train partners via smartphones?

The average age of employees has dropped dramatically. Younger, more modern people began to work for our partners, and we needed to find an approach to them and the way of learning that suits them.
Lika Rassomakhina
CEO, Bogner Russia and CIS
What happened «after», and how is everything now arranged?
Our main goal in the implementation of mobile learning was to make store employees feel like a part of the Bogner team, and not an individual salesperson who works for a partner somewhere in Yekaterinburg.

The main advantage of the new training format is that we were able to create a complete catalog of all our models right in the smartphone from the sellers of our partners. You can change it on the fly, add, for example, a new season, and if something has changed, everything can be fixed in a minute. Searching by article, by name, by color - all this was impossible in a paper version or in the format of a regular slide course, all this, to put it mildly, is outdated and inconvenient.

The second part of - teaching skills, these are micro-courses that do not change so often, but this is our specificity, technically there is such an opportunity. We teach the history of the company, what materials we use, how to properly care for clothes, as well as train employees on new collections.
How did we choose a platform
We first realized that we needed mobile learning. We can't travel a lot across Russia with face-to-face training or make endless PowerPoint presentations, and our partners have been doing everything from a smartphone for a long time.

Then we began to analyze the market, collected about 8 different services for learning automation, compared the pros and cons according to two criteria:
Convenient and simple content editor
We wanted it to be convenient for us to create educational content. We do not have time to study complex software products, to make slide courses in SCORM format, this is all the past century: it is long, which means it is expensive. We wanted a "sat and go" solution.
Visibility and simplicity
Now all ages are well versed in social networks, modern corporate training should be similar to what everyone is used to, for example, Instagram. It was also important that the test can only be taken once.
We chose the Skill Cup platform for organizing mobile learning, largely because it implements a gradual presentation of material in a microlearning format.

This format is very easy to read, there is no feeling that you are sitting and reading a history textbook. This semi-game form was very well received by the employees of our partners and quickly became the new standard of training.

Plus, you can quickly publish news, for example, we had an exhibition in Munich, and we immediately posted it, made an update for partners. Everyone feels their involvement, the "pulse" of the parent company.

Solution: training in Skill Cup

In the Skill Cup, even a non-specialist can make courses in a mobile format - it's no more difficult than publishing a story on Instagram.
Lika Rassomakhina
CEO, Bogner Russia and CIS
How did Bogner benefit?
Satisfied partners
We have become much freer in interaction with partners. This means that customer service is getting better and, ultimately, business performance will grow. We now have our own direct communication channel with the partner network. Of course, we will do a lot more on the basis of the Skill Cup, the platform is flexible, so we have not used all the potential.

01

Cost reduction
The cost of creating educational content has decreased - everything has become faster, more convenient, easier. And this adds to everyone's positive attitude and mood for victory - both to our team and partners.

02

Availability of information
The Skill Cup has become a useful working tool for our internal team as well. For example, when we communicate with our design department and need to remember a model in order not to go into our internal catalog, we open the Skill Cup, and look for this model and its characteristics in it. This turned out to be very applicable for daily business - an application use that we did not expect.

03

Openness of information
The beauty is that this application can be used with a buyer, there is no super-closed information there. The seller can open a catalog on a smartphone, dial the article number and see which manufacturer, what feature of the model, with which it is customary to combine it. It helps to sell.

04

With the help of Skill Cup we managed to create such an unobtrusive and, at the same time, working channel of interaction with the entire partner network. As one of the employees said: "What we were really looking forward to was personal touch, a constant connection with the brand, with the office in Germany.