How Veneta benefits from UGC | Case study

This case study explores how Veneta uses Flowbox to bring real customer content into the buying journey, and why the team moved to a full API integration to take that experience even further.

Veneta is one of the leading custom window covering specialists in Europe, helping customers find the perfect blinds, shutters, and curtains for their homes.

With fully made-to-measure products that customers cannot physically experience before ordering, building trust online is central to their eCommerce strategy.

Since implementing Flowbox, Veneta collects around 500 images from customers per month and has covered 15% of their product catalog with UGC. The team has observed a rise in assisted sales, with users buying after engaging with the UGC galleries.

The Numbers

The Story

Veneta is headquartered in Zwolle, the Netherlands. With a team of over 300 people, the company operates across the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Australia, offering fully bespoke blinds, shutters, and curtains tailored to each customer’s specifications.

With expert advisors who offer in-home consultations and professional installers ensuring a seamless experience, Veneta has built a reputation for craftsmanship and personalised service.

The Challenge

Within Veneta’s eCommerce team, the focus was on continuously optimising the online customer experience and increasing conversion rates. As the team explored ways to give customers more confidence during their buying journey, UGC emerged as a natural fit.

“Because Veneta sells completely custom-made window coverings, the purchase decision is relatively significant for many customers. They cannot physically experience the product beforehand, only through color samples. That is why it is crucial for us to build as much trust as possible before a customer places an order.”

Coen Boom-Huijsmans, eCommerce Manager at Veneta

Professional product photography played a role, but it could only show products in controlled, styled environments. Customers needed to see how window coverings looked in real homes, with real interiors, under real lighting conditions. UGC provides inspiration, quality proof, and social validation that professional imagery alone could not deliver.

“Professional product photos are important, but they only tell part of the story. UGC aligns perfectly with our needs. By showcasing real customer photos and experiences, we can provide inspiration, display the quality of our products from multiple perspectives, and leverage social proof to eliminate hesitation during the purchasing process.”

Coen Boom-Huijsmans, eCommerce Manager at Veneta

But for a brand with Veneta’s level of attention to detail, simply displaying a social feed was not enough. The content needed to be placed strategically, curated carefully, and presented in a way that felt native to the Veneta experience; and for this, the brand chose Flowbox’s UGC platform.

The Solution

Veneta’s implementation was led by conversion thinking from the start. Rather than placing Flowbox UGC galleries indiscriminately across the site, the team prioritised the pages where social proof would have the greatest impact.

Next to home and category pages, it’s listed on the product detail pages, where customers are in the final stage of their buying journey.

Veneta’s UGC gallery on a product page

Throughout the implementation phase and after go-live, the team optimised the setup based on user behaviour and internal insights, refining widget placement and content relevance with each iteration.

Flowbox has become an established part of Veneta’s eCommerce workflows. New content is gathered from the brand’s social media channels and carefully reviewed before publication, ensuring every image meets the quality and relevance standards the team expects.

“Within the eCommerce team, we constantly evaluate which products need content and which content best matches specific products and categories. We work closely with marketing to ensure the content remains up-to-date and aligns with our brand identity.”

Coen Boom-Huijsmans, eCommerce Manager at Veneta

This close collaboration between eCommerce and the Brand Team keeps the galleries fresh and ensures the UGC customers see reflects current collections, interior trends, and seasonal styles.

Since the implementation, UGC has grown into a vital component of the online customer experience, giving shoppers a much more realistic view of the products in real homes and diverse interior styles.

“Especially for custom-made products, showing authentic customer images alongside professional photography has proven to be incredibly valuable.”

Coen Boom-Huijsmans, eCommerce Manager at Veneta

From widgets to full API integration

As Veneta’s use of UGC matured, so did the team’s ambitions. The standard widgets delivered clear results, but, together with the development team, the eCommerce team identified an opportunity to go further: full control over how content is presented, tighter performance optimisation, and UGC that feels completely native to Veneta’s own front-end. That led them to Flowbox’s API.

“While we initially used standard widgets, we are now working on a full API integration. The main driver behind this is our desire to gain even more control over content presentation, website performance, and how UGC is integrated into our own front-end.”

Coen Boom-Huijsmans, eCommerce Manager at Veneta

The API opens up possibilities that go well beyond what standard widgets can offer. Veneta now pulls raw content from Flowbox and renders it inside their own templates and components. That changes what becomes possible: galleries that adapt to the page they sit on, content that responds to what a visitor has browsed, and UGC that can appear anywhere in the experience without design compromises.

“The API will allow us to seamlessly match Flowbox with our unique ‘Veneta style’ and customer journey. Furthermore, it unlocks the potential to personalise content even more intelligently and deploy it dynamically across multiple areas of the website in the future.”

Coen Boom-Huijsmans, eCommerce Manager at Veneta

For Veneta, the move to the API is not a departure from what came before, but a natural evolution. The team saw clear value from Flowbox’s standard implementation, and the API integration is the next step in embedding UGC even deeper into the customer experience they are continuously refining.

The Flowbox Experience