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Who is Dreambaby?
Dreambaby sells baby equipment and is the only Belgian player in its market, with stores in both Flanders and Wallonia. The chain runs 32 stores and employs around 300 people.
The strategy is built around making it as easy as possible for customers to buy. “We want that customer journey to be as frictionless as possible,” explains Patrick Michielsens, General Manager at Dreambaby. Store and webshop should feel the same and be properly integrated rather than bolted together. That ambition has a very concrete technical consequence: the tills can never go down.
Thirty-two stores opening their tills at the same moment
“Tills are super crucial. You cannot afford for them to suddenly fall over.”
Retail has sharp, predictable peaks. When the stores open, 32 tills come online at once. When they close, every booking made that day is pushed through to accounting. Both moments demand real computing power in a short window, every day.
On top of that come two concepts most retailers do not run: a new loyalty programme and a new baby registry, both data-hungry, both working on the fly alongside the POS system. “Our business looks simple. But those are extra concepts that other retailers do not have, and they ask for an awful lot of data.”
The spaghetti had to go
The old environment was the kind that grows rather than gets designed.
“We had a lot of old architecture applications that were basically end of life,” says Michielsens. “And now and then a spaghetti of applications where you knew: if I pull this thread, I have no idea where it is going to end.”
Every five years a new generation of customers arrives with different expectations, and an ageing IT estate was never going to meet them. The renewal started four years ago.
The target architecture was deliberately plain: one central package managing as much of the data as possible, with other applications attached around it like a spider web, each earning its place. That thinking led Dreambaby to Odoo. And one requirement ran through the whole selection — the environment had to be very stable, performant and constantly available.
Migrated in under two weeks
Another of Dreambaby’s software partners recommended Hosted Power. “From the very first conversation it felt like it clicked immediately.”
The timing was awkward: Dreambaby was in the middle of its development and testing phase. The migration happened anyway, and fast.
“I think we migrated to your systems in less than two weeks, which is phenomenally fast. That also meant we could move towards a go-live with full confidence.”
Two partners, one room
Konu handled the Odoo implementation, Hosted Power the platform underneath it. How the two behaved towards each other mattered as much as what either delivered.
“You have one partner that takes on the ERP system, and alongside that you have the hosting partner. That cooperation between the two is crucial to be able to move quickly.”
There was respect on both sides and a shared sense of urgency. “Both parties knew: we have to work on this together to get to solutions. I think that was one of the crucial elements of our success and of our go-live.”
Hence the advice Michielsens gives other retailers: get every partner in one room, let them have the discussions they need to have while you coordinate, and watch the chemistry between them.
The big bang
The switch was not gentle. A carve-out following the sale from Colruyt Group to Vanhalst Retail Group meant a new ERP had to be live within eight months. And Dreambaby chose to do it all at once.
Every till, a new baby registry, a new website, a new loyalty concept, every internal process, and new hardware in every store, on the same day.
“So yes, you swallow hard for a moment. But we actually got through it fairly smoothly.”
There were growing pains and bugs, as there always are. “We are through the growing pains, and these days you really feel it: the system is stable, it is performant.”
Proactive, not reactive
What Dreambaby keeps coming back to is not an incident. It is the messages that arrive before there is one — a database starting to fill up, say, reported before it becomes a problem.
“You manage our servers, you manage our data. We always get told very proactively: guys, we are seeing something here that looks a bit odd. Then we get a direct notification, so we can often pick it up quickly with our partner.”
The reasoning is simple: if that signal came too late, stability and performance would be what suffers. And when Dreambaby raises something itself, a reply often lands within the hour.
The biggest win is transparency
Ask about the single largest gain and the answer is not speed or uptime.
“The biggest win we had and still have today is transparency. We can follow completely, from beginning to end, what is happening and what actions are being taken.”
When something goes wrong, Dreambaby can look at it immediately instead of discovering it later. “Previously that probably took two or three days before we even heard about it, and then you have to go searching afterwards. So there are enormous time savings in the support we give our own people.”
What comes next
With a stable foundation in place, Dreambaby is looking at growing further inside the ERP and making it more sophisticated. AI is on the agenda too, to raise internal efficiency and to surface insights faster. The confidence is there — and so is the standard Dreambaby holds its partners to.
“I look for partners who are proud of their work. Who can go home at the end of the day and say: I am proud that I did that for Dreambaby. And only in second or third place comes the invoicing.”
