Sweden's oldest publisher, reimagined for digital. 213% more social traffic.

Background

Norstedts was founded in Stockholm in 1823 and is Sweden's oldest publishing house, with a catalogue spanning nearly two centuries of literary history. The company publishes authors including Stieg Larsson, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Claude Simon — among the most recognised names in Swedish and international literature. A publisher of this heritage has both an extraordinary archive of content and a distinctive brand to maintain in the digital era.

By the mid-2010s, Norstedts' website was failing to represent this heritage effectively. The technical platform had not kept pace with modern CMS capabilities, and the social media and mobile traffic that represented the future of book discovery was not being converted into meaningful engagement with the Norstedts brand.

The Challenge

Norstedts needed a digital presence that could:

• Present the depth and richness of their author and book catalogue without putting strain on editorial and IT teams
• Support a proactive social and digital media strategy — at the time of the project, Norstedts' social presence was under-leveraged relative to their literary stature
• Deliver high-quality text and image presentation worthy of a premium literary brand
• Retain visitors through deeper engagement with author stories, book content, and editorial features
• Be mobile-first, given the growing share of book discovery happening on mobile devices

Our Solution

After discovery workshops, Divante recommended and implemented Pimcore as the CMS — providing a unified platform for managing book and author data, editorial content, and digital assets. The implementation included full ERP integration to synchronise product data (books, images, metadata) from Norstedts' internal systems into the Pimcore data model — eliminating the manual data management overhead that had been draining editorial team time.

The site was designed mobile-first and built for Google AMP, maximising performance for mobile visitors arriving from social media. A new digital media strategy with targeted social advertising was developed alongside the technical implementation, ensuring the improved platform was matched with a distribution strategy capable of reaching Norstedts' audience on the channels where they were discovering books.

Impact & Results

• Traffic from social media increased by 213%
• Mobile traffic grew by 21%
• Pageviews per visit increased by 15% — indicating deeper engagement with the content
• Bounce rate decreased by 28%, reflecting improved content relevance and site usability