Norwegian Bakes Boosts Online Sales with Redesigned Etsy Storefront

Norwegian Baked is a Brooklyn, NY manufacturer that produces traditional knekkebrød, a freshly baked crispbread. These cracker-like products are sold directly to consumers on Etsy and through national retail partners.

Norwegian Baked uses traditional family recipes to bake crispbread (knekkebrød) in its Brooklyn bakery. The business has experienced solid growth with wholesale partners who resell the crispbread nationwide. Norwegian Baked is also seeing promising success on their Etsy storefront, with over 3,000 unique orders and rave reviews. Because these products are highly specific, the search terms around them are very deliberate, leading to high conversion rates with a large percentage of visitors to the Etsy shop becoming paying customers. However, these specific product terms also limit the ability to attract new traffic or introduce non-Nordics to Norwegian Baked’s products. The New York City Industrial & Technology Assistance Corporation (ITAC), part of the New York MEP and the MEP National Network^TM, partnered with Norwegian Baked to initiate a project to optimize the Etsy website store to increase both organic traffic and order volume, while maintaining high conversion rates.

Since the term “Knekkebrød” is very specific, ITAC and its partners recommended techniques to attract a broader audience and introduce the product to new customers. The project began with a visual refresh. The online storefront layout was improved, and updated branding and images helped showcase some of the many ways this traditional snack can be enjoyed in American households.

New products were also developed to further expand keywords and listings. Revised titles and product images helped attract a broader audience on both new and existing product listings, and additional testing was conducted on related keywords. These new terms focused on health benefits, snacks, and recipes that use crackers, as well as other unique advantages that introduced Knekkebrød to a wider range of consumers.

Like any online campaign, it’s essential to keep experimenting and optimizing. To track this testing process and progress, templates were created for long-term research and growth. The Norwegian Baked team gained new knowledge of listing format templates, research methods, and other optimization skills to better manage this process.

Tests ran for four weeks, and after this period, results were recorded, and further edits were made. The impacts of this project were immediate, and the team was excited about the results.

Thanks to the success of this work, ITAC introduced Norwegian Baked to a similar Brooklyn business, and they are co-developing a product line to launch on the Etsy storefront.