Illums Bolighus

Living in a fast paced world with an ever-increasing online presence, we expect fast access to products online without losing valuable time during our daily lives. For Illums Bolighus, living up to these expectations, and giving customers fast access to products, proved to be a challenge during their popular "shopping nights", resulting in lost revenue.



Illums Bolighus was originally founded in 1925 under the name of BO. The man behind BO was the Danish entrepreneur Kaj Dessau, who was blessed with a strong sense of aesthetics as well as a flair for business. Working with his artistic consultant Brita Drewsen, he created a concept that had never been seen before: a store with arranged and furnished interiors, where textiles, appointments, and furniture all interacted as art. The exceptional foresight displayed by both Drewsen and Dessau, as well as their impeccable sense of style and quality, played an important role in the international acclaim long accorded to Danish interior design.

After the store was purchased in 1941 by the Illum, Berg, and Trock-Jansen families, who also owned the A.C. Illum A/S department store, it was renamed Illums Bolighus A/S. Today, Illums Bolighus is owned by a Danish investment group headed by CEO Henrik Ypkendanz. Since his appointment to that position in 2001, the store has enjoyed a positive development in customer reviews and increased profitability. Illums Bolighus now have stores in Norway, Sweden and Germany.

Illums Bolighus had the need to handle a lot of traffic in a very short period of time. They have a concept called “shopping nights” for their Loyalty Club members. 3 to 4 times a year, their No. 1 customers can use points to shop great deals but only for one day. During these shopping nights, the traffic was enormous on their website which resulted in their servers crashing.

In Illums Bolighus’ old Dynamicweb solution they needed to implement a queue system to handle all the traffic. This was not an optimal solution and had a negative impact on their turnover.

With Dynamicweb, NORRIQ made a highly scalable solution, by using Cloudflare Cashing, which made the shopping experience faster and products more accessible for the customers visiting Iillums Bolighus. By using Caching, the system stores copies of files in a cache, or temporary storage location, which makes accessing them faster for each customer visiting the website. Illums Bolighus handles all the transaction through Dynamicweb Ecommerce.

Illums Bolighus now has the ability to meet customers expectations, and handle the increased traffic during shopping nights, much faster and more efficiently by having a pre-loaded website. Illums Bolighus is now faster than some of the largest e-commerce solutions in the Nordic region.