How Oatly built 16 global websites in just two months

tl;dr: Oatly was growing fast.They needed to help their developers and creatives manage digital experiences in multiple languages across 25+ countries. Oatly chose to grow into the future and upgrade their CMS with Storyblok.

Now, Oatly developers can build with any front end and integrate any technology with ease. Oatly's creative team can create and edit content with a simple visual editor that might just be the best in the industry. Work is easier. Oatly can now go to market faster than before.

If you’ve ever ordered an oat latte, chances are, Oatly was in your latte. Oatly is to Oatmilk as Kleenex is to tissues, a brand so dominant they are the category. What does that look like in terms of growth? Three consecutive years of triple-digit growth, including a whopping 212% growth rate in 2020. 

One of the driving forces behind Oatly’s success is Oatly’s creative team, “the Department of Mind Control”. With Oatly’s rapid global expansion, that team found themselves managing websites and other digital experiences in multiple languages across 25+ countries. While their CMS was great for managing simple content, Oatly now needed way more from a CMS. And so, they went in search of a new one. A few requirements were top of mind:

Freedom for developers: Oatly wanted their developers to be able to build things using whatever language/frontend framework they were comfortable with. This meant that an all-in-one CMS like WordPress/Magento was not an option. 

Ease-of-use for everyone else: Oatly’s creative team, “The Oatly Department of Mind Control”, played a huge role in spreading the gospel of sustainability that fueled Oatly’s meteoric rise. Oatly needed to ensure that any new CMS had a simple editor interface that was super easy for designers, marketers, and anyone on the creative team to use.

Future-proof tech stack: Oatly had already outgrown both WordPress and Apostrophe CMS. As part of Oatly’s cloud-based infrastructure strategy, Oatly developers should have the freedom to adopt any new technology or integration.

Speed: When your developers waste their time developing the same components over and over, it takes longer to launch everything. Ditto for when your creative team has to update a headline on a landing page, and then edit the exact same headline in an app. Oatly wanted to eliminate anything that would slow their teams down and make it harder to collaborate and be creative. 

Storyblok wins the day

With these requirements in mind, Oatly researched the leading options in the CMS market. They chose to go with Storyblok as the cloud-first, headless solution that delivered everything they needed to scale and continue to grow globally. Using Storyblok, they were able to create sixteen global websites in just two months. This would have been unthinkable with their previous CMS. 

Oatly’s creative team can now:

• See their content edits in real-time. This allows them to independently create, edit and publish content in Storyblok’s Visual Editor without a ton of developer involvement. 
• Organize all of their digital assets, along with the content they create, in structured folders. No more looking for lost images, assets, or projects.
• Thanks to well-organized, reusable content at their fingertips, Oatly can build sites from scratch and go to market faster.

Oatly’s developers:

• Are free to use whatever programming language they want to build things
• Can choose any current or future technology that fits Oatly’s needs,  regardless of whether they’re dealing with security, eCommerce, or localization.
• Clone and reuse content across any campaign/page across Oatly’s 16 different global sites

Creativity and collaboration play an essential part in Oatly’s success. With Storyblok, Oatly now has a CMS that helps on both fronts. Oatly’s development workflow is more streamlined. Now, the Department of Mind Control can spend more time flexing their creative muscles on things like Oatly’s Hey Barista, a digital magazine focused on coffee culture, which is currently being migrated to Storyblok. Collaborative projects are flourishing, with Oatly exploring localized regional catalogs and content for their eCommerce efforts in the US.