It’s not every day that a company built on helping others to build ecommerce sites gets into ecommerce itself by acquiring a retailer — but that’s exactly what happened when Brilliance Business Solutions bought Norsland Lefse in 2024.
Lori McDonald, the founder, president and CEO at Brilliance, knew what it was like to solve problems for clients. Adding a Scandinavian food products company and cafe to Brilliance’s portfolio, however, was new territory. With it came facilities for preparing lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread, along with a local and national base of customers. The deal marked Brilliance’s first acquisition and gave it a testing ground for ecommerce site updates and improvements.
McDonald spoke to Digital Commerce 360 about what she has learned through the process, growing Norsland Lefse’s business, addressing needs in real time and bringing those learnings back to Brilliance’s core business.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part interview with Lori McDonald. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Why Brilliance acquired Norsland Lefse
Digital Commerce 360: Where did Norsland Lefse fit into Brilliance’s story last year when you made this acquisition?
Lori McDonald, president and CEO at Brilliance Business Solutions | Image credit: Brilliance Business Solutions
Lori McDonald: We have been in the primarily B2B ecommerce space for 26 years. And we decided that as a part of our growth story it would be interesting — because our target market is manufacturers and distributors that we help implement digital commerce — to acquire a small manufacturing company that we saw as having potential in digital and help them grow.
As a part of our strategic plans for Brilliance, we set out looking for a small manufacturing company that we could acquire [and] that we thought had specific potential in digital that we could help them realize. And so we had been on the lookout for a few years and then came across Norsland Lefse.
I’m in Milwaukee. Norsland Lefse is in Rushford, Minnesota. We discovered Norsland Lefse in the summer of 2023 — and that the owner of Norsland Lefse was looking to retire. The majority of their revenue was coming via Amazon, although they also had ecommerce revenue coming via Wix.
What we found to be really attractive about Norsland Lefse — well, there are many things: One, obviously it has a niche product. They focus on serving specifically Scandinavian customers with a very focused set of products and kind of culture message. There’s not a ton of competition.
The competition that we saw out in the market wasn’t investing a lot from a digital perspective. And the Amazon business is great and also offered opportunities to improve profit margins — and grow in terms of they have a very loyal customer base that loves them a lot.
We acquired Norsland Lefse in February of 2024. So it’s been about a year. We moved them to [the ecommerce platform] BigCommerce within three months of the acquisition. We kept that project really small.
Really interesting from a product perspective: Norsland Lefse makes their lefse from Russet potatoes. We don’t use potato flakes. There’s this great group of people that have been making lefse for 40 years in Rushford, Minnesota. There’s a cafe.
The city of Rushford, Minnesota — it’s a city of about 2,000 people — they have an economic development authority that is interested in supporting job growth in Rushford. So they were a part of helping us put together the loan to buy the business. As we were saying, we believe we can create jobs and help grow economic opportunity.
Norsland Lefse’s backstory and growth opportunity
DC360: How long was Norsland Lefse’s history — prior to the acquisition — as a brand?
LM: Norsland Lefse started in 1983 and went through a few different owners. Merlin Hoynes was the original founder of Norsland Lefse. He’s Norwegian. He and his wife loved lefse and loved making lefse for other people.
He was kind of the inventor, along with a local manufacturer that made custom-built rolling machines that were in use making lefse when I bought the business. They were not in the best shape, but they were custom-built back in 1983. So really cool stuff.
DC360: This might be an obvious question knowing your specialization at Brilliance and your use of BigCommerce with your clients. But did you know immediately that you wanted to make a shift to BigCommerce with them? Or was there a period of learning?
LM: We knew that we had planned for that when we were making the acquisition. The previous site wasn’t mobile responsive, so we knew we needed to do something. The question is what we were going to do.
DC360: What did you know you needed to improve about the ecommerce experience?
LM: Well, the user experience — they had people that were placing orders because they loved the product and they knew they wanted it. And it wasn’t because it was a great experience. But you know, when you’ve got a product people want, they find a way to buy it, right?
DC360: That’s a huge advantage.
LM: Right, exactly. But we knew there was a lot of opportunity. We knew eventually we wanted to spend money on paid search and other forms of marketing. But we didn’t want to drive traffic to a site that didn’t provide a good experience for people.
So we knew that was gonna be one of the things we wanted to do immediately. Something else we knew we were going to want to do immediately was email marketing investments. There was an email list of about 3,000 people when we acquired the company, but we knew that was something that we saw a lot of potential to grow.
We set ourselves up with Klaviyo, and that was something that even before we made the move to BigCommerce, we said, we’re going to work to be very intentional about email marketing.
There were a number of things from a user experience perspective. Norsland Lefse primarily sells retail, but also has wholesale customers — which is part of the reason that it was attractive, both to Brilliance because we do a lot of work in the B2B ecommerce space, but also from a BigCommerce perspective.
We saw that as an opportunity for us to be leveraging both the B2B capabilities of the platform and from a retail side as well — although in the beginning I should say we kept scope really small. We didn’t implement all the things we knew we wanted; we just said, let’s enable us to get to an experience that is mobile friendly.
Editor’s note: Read the second part of this interview tomorrow, right here on DigitalCommerce360.com
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