Neil Korgaokar
- Quote
- The increase in customer satisfaction is a huge accomplishment for us, as that is a key KPI for our ambition to offer best-in-class service to our customers.
Overview
Electronic waste is one of the defining sustainability challenges of our time. Husqvarna, a company with more than 300 years of heritage in high-quality outdoor products, refused to be part of the problem.
Their ecommerce platform serves a radically diverse user base: professional foresters who lose money every minute a tool is broken, and passionate amateur gardeners navigating a catalog of over 30,000 spare parts without technical expertise. The gap between those two worlds was costing customers time and patience and ultimately driving them toward replacement rather than repair. Husqvarna came to Merkle to close that gap.
-
+500%
increase in successfully located spare parts -
56%
uplift in spare part sales YoY -
25%
of all online sales now from spare parts, up from 12.5% -
20%
boost in customer satisfaction at checkout -
#1
record monthly revenue in the first month post-launch
The challenge
Husqvarna's spare parts catalog contained over 30,000 articles, but finding the right part was anything but simple. Customers spent long stretches on hold with customer service or gave up entirely and bought new products instead.
The problem was made harder by the sharp contrast between Husqvarna's two main user groups. Professional foresters need the right part fast because downtime costs money. Residential gardeners often lack the technical vocabulary to navigate a complex parts library at all.
One shared digital experience was failing both groups, and the environmental cost of that friction added up.
The approach
Merkle redesigned the entire spare parts experience from the ground up. The ambition was straightforward: make it simple enough to use from the top of a tree or over a brief cup of coffee in the garden.
The team started with qualitative and quantitative research across more than 600 customers to understand exactly where and why users dropped off. The finding was consistent: most customers were willing to repair rather than replace, but they could not find the right part. That became the brief.
The result was a visual, interactive Spare Parts Finder. Users could navigate Husqvarna's vast catalog through intuitive visual flows, without needing technical knowledge or jargon. Parts could be added to the basket in a single click, with no detours through product detail pages. Faceted search was tailored to match the wide range of phrases real users actually searched for, and the full product dataset was optimized, including exploded product visualizations for complex assemblies.
The feature went through several design iterations and user tests before launch. If users still needed help, access to Husqvarna or a local dealer was built directly into the experience.
The outcome
The results came in immediately. In the first month after launch, Husqvarna recorded its highest-ever monthly spare parts revenue in four years of tracking. Spare parts now account for 25% of all online sales, up from around 12.5% before. Customer satisfaction at checkout rose 20%.
The environmental case is just as strong. Researchers estimate that right-to-repair initiatives can reduce e-waste by up to 30%. By making repair genuinely easy, Husqvarna and Merkle showed that sustainability and business growth can point in the same direction.
This project is bigger than a product feature. It is proof that the right digital experience can shift real behavior at scale.
- Quote Neil Korgaoka
