Less manual effort, more awareness: How OBI uses revel8 to standardize phishing simulations across countries

Company Background 

Since 1970, OBI has been an iconic part of the international "Do it Yourself" landscape. More than 50 years later, orange blood runs through the veins of 40,000 employees across 10 countries in Europe as well as in Asia, and OBI has long been more than a hardware store. While the company's heart continues to beat locally in its more than 660 physical stores, the team works tirelessly on the future of DIY and on its vision of the hardware store of the future. 

Why OBI chose revel8 

OBI was looking for a security awareness partner that understands how employees and companies in Germany work. The platform needed to be customisable to OBI’s own needs, clearly focused on information security, and offer different levels of difficulty. It also had to support internationalisation and cover specific roles such as admins and HR.
Also, OBI chose revel8 because it is a German company, and not a large established corporation but a start-up led by experts. What stood out was the chance for OBI to help shape ideas and features, along with automated simulations adapted to employee behaviour, a playlist that is continually expanded to reflect the current threat landscape, and the option to run its own campaigns.

Details on partnership 

OBI has been working with revel8 since September 2025. The onboarding took place over several months. Rather than rushing, revel8 and OBI have made good use of the time  to set up the technical integration calmly and to plan the rollout in detail, with communication running across several OBI channels so that as many people as possible were reached. The introduction went seamlessly and the feedback has been positive.

At the moment, the focus is on automated phishing simulations, which are being rolled out across all  Store Support Centers – as OBI calls its headquarters.  The rollout to the OBI stores will take place in the next phase, followed by social engineering scenarios tailored for top management."  The team especially values the different difficulty levels of the simulations, which adapt to how confident each person is at spotting threats, along with the supportive follow-up email that gives employees useful information after they report a simulated phishing message.

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Initial success 

After adopting revel8, OBI noticed less manual effort across the entire phishing simulation cycle, from concept and planning through execution, evaluation and follow-up. The same tool and the same procedure are now used across all countries, which brought a level of standardisation that had been missing before. Employees have become more familiar with the defined reporting channels and with how to react correctly in a real incident. This progress is clearly reflected in the data: the interaction rate with simulated phishing attempts dropped steadily over a few months, showing that employees are interacting far less with suspicious content.  Awareness of information security in general has grown as well, and the team saw these changes take hold across the different locations. 

Looking forward 

Looking ahead, OBI plans to extend its work with revel8 to more countries to cover new types of attacks and to roll out the revel8 academy. The company is also preparing a cyber week for next year and intends to involve revel8 in its implementation.

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