Decades of Digital Transformation

"Digital Transformation" was still a long way from being an established concept (not even speaking of an own Netural business unit) when Austrian eyewear manufacturer Silhouette, searching for competent web designers and software engineers, came across Netural. This was the start of two decades of successful partnership, a story that deserves a closer look as a shining example of digital transformation with an impact on business models and processes that grows stronger with each single project.

Long before the year 2000, Silhouette´s groundbreaking eyewear design had already won global recognition. Nowadays, Silhouette is equally popular with movie stars and pop musicians, space travelers and business leaders. That sounds wildly exaggerated, but is a proven fact, and serves to explain the exceptionally high standards that Silhouette applied in the post-millennium launch of a new website to document both the company´s aesthetic taste and its technical prowess.

Silhouette chose the then young digital company Netural as its implementation and development partner. It was the beginning of a joint journey that has been going on for two decades now, winning a significance that reveals itself only in retrospect. Also Netural internally: Because of customers and projects like these, the consulting unit for digital transformation "Netural Sphere" has been launched now.

Setting the initial course

One of the most crucial decisions was made at the very beginning of the journey: With an eye on, and far beyond, web applications, Netural set out to make the entire Silhouette product range available as digital 3D renderings. The reward for this considerable effort was a whole world of new, exciting possibilities, especially in terms of B2C product presentation: Not much later, for example, Silhouette made an enormous splash with the "Virtual Mirror", a web application that drove a large-format display at the Vienna International Airport. Directing the “Virtual Mirror” with gestures, travelers could try on various models of photo-realistic virtual glasses in a truly groundbreaking world's first!

Milestone after milestone

A somewhat less spectacular step with at least equal significance for business processes was taken at about the same time with the implementation of the Silhouette B2B portal which enabled optician shops to integrate their merchandise management systems – groundbreaking back then, and still working very efficiently today.

Other milestones followed, for example a shop-in-shop configuration tool for partner opticians, the click & collect solution "Buy Local," which combines online purchasing options with the expertise of the optician shop to give eyewear buyers the best of both shopping worlds - and also the patented Silhouette "Vision Sensation App", which digitally integrates the entire sales process from consultation and fitting to ordering and delivery.

Ongoing change

At the end of 2022, Netural has once again completely rebuilt the Silhouette corporate website to reflect the rapid changes of recent years, answering to a growing awareness of the need for sustainability and compatibility with the environment, an increasing competition for scarce human resources and correspondingly rising demands on employer branding, and last but not least, to a progressive internationalization of the sales network.

Digital sparring

"I really appreciate Netural as a sparring partner and visionary. As someone who continuously directs our focus on looking at things from the customer's perspective and driving them forward," describes Silhouette International CMO, Michael Schmied, the long-standing partnership with Netural. And Netural CEO, Albert Ortig, comments. “We have created pioneering digital solutions with every single project. But that also applies to the entire journey through so many stages of digital transformation. And that was one of the reasons why we at Netural also made digital consulting ‘official’ and founded our 'Netural Sphere' consulting unit.”

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More interesting links:

Interview with Netural CEO and founder, Albert Ortig

abc dental digital transformation

Netural Sphere services