From picking up the phone to a 10× digital business.

Damstahl distributes tens of thousands of tonnes of stainless steel every year — bar, plate, tube and sheet — to the food, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and energy industries across more than ten European countries. For decades that trade ran the way the steel trade has always run: on the phone, over email, through people who knew the catalog by heart.

Where they started

Damstahl had used standard e-commerce CMS platforms before, but none could carry the weight of how steel is sold — so as customers came to expect a real digital experience, the old model began to strain. The company needed a platform as ambitious as its digital strategy, and as specific as its product.

Making an order online should be easier than calling us.

— The principle the Damstahl platform was built on

The solution

Slize built Damstahl a headless, composable commerce platform on a modular architecture — every component integrate-able, upgradeable or replaceable without a re-platform. The storefront is a single-page application: fast enough that self-service genuinely beats picking up the phone.

Underneath, the platform unifies Damstahl's own data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 FO and the Perfion PIM feed a central API gateway, combined with Umbraco for content, Algolia for search and ActiveCampaign for marketing — so stock, pricing and orders stay live and consistent everywhere a customer looks.

The same system serves the sales desk. Reps place and manage orders in the very tool their customers use, which cut order-handling effort sharply and freed the team to spend its time on relationships rather than data entry.

With Slize's self-service portal, our clients can check stock, order and track deliveries without calling us. We've reduced manual processing time by 70%.

— Damstahl, Steel Distributor

The results

Within eighteen months of go-live, digital revenue had grown tenfold. Order processing ran 80% faster, 89% of order lines were being placed digitally, and the efficiencies added up to 48 full-time roles saved. Because digital orders price more accurately than phone orders, they also carry a higher gross margin.

The outcome isn't a webshop bolted onto a wholesaler. It's a digital business that scales — one where the complexity of steel lives in the platform, not in people's heads.

The work drew wide recognition: together, Damstahl and Slize swept the 2023 Danish E-commerce Awards — winning Guldprisen (the grand prize), Best Export Case and Best B2B Company — and Damstahl has since been named Best B2B Company with online revenue over DKK 500 million.