Camelbak

Sound experience design starts with an understanding of the end consumer. To understand how CamelBak’s loyalists, and soon-to-be loyalists, connected with and shopped for their products, we broke their audience into a series of personas that correspond with their attitudinal and behavioral segments.

Once we better understood CamelBak’s core consumers, we could shape stories and an experience that inspire them to achieve the performances and outdoor experiences they dream of. CamelBak’s consumers turn to their hydration products when their knuckles are white, when they’re on top of mountains, or pushing through their last mile — and CamelBak has their back.

To turn experience-driven clicks into cash flow, we worked with CamelBak and their engineering partners to build a robust eCommerce platform powered by enterprise Microsoft Sitecore technology. This shift from a third-party logistics (3PL) provider into an integrated merchandising and logistics approach improves buyer experience and gives the CamelBak marketing teams more control over how they showcase and deliver their products to the end customer. Today’s consumers want to buy wherever, and whenever the want. We integrated a “Buy Locally” option into their platform that uses auto geolocation to drive in-store purchases for nearby distributors. This has resulted in increased conversion rates, higher sales, and more frequent SKU turnover.

No matter how large or small your eCommerce or marketing team is, it is critical to save time through smarter technology. Our commerce build gives CamelBak the ability to make their products available for purchase, as well as track and deploy those products — all unified in one easy-to-use platform. So our commerce build not only delivers a better experience for the customer, but gives CamelBak’s brand managers extra time and bandwidth they need to provide value. Component-driven design and engineering techniques make for a scalable experience that lets us rapidly build new pages and templates to meet CamelBak’s expanding needs. Our flexible content management system build gives CamelBak the flexibility to quickly update merchandise, and run promotions. This not only saves them time and money, but allows for the personalization needed to meet consumer expectations.

Our unique approach combines Design Thinking, Agile ways of working, and Lean Startup principles to drive innovation. A project is only as successful as the foundation it starts upon. We started with a rapid knowledge transfer that distilled all the information we needed to frame CamelBak’s business challenge. It broke down silos to identify the the people, processes, platforms, purpose, and outcomes that will define success. Next, our multidisciplinary team, hand-picked for their specific needs, generated ideas, concepts, and solutions. Everything from UX to keyword research, competitive analysis, content strategy, information architecture, and site mapping. We did the research and built all the concepts as real as they needed to be to test our hypotheses for what would resonate with CamelBak’s core customers and stakeholders. After rounds of iteration, we validated viable solutions that continue to drive business results.

To improve CamelBak’s ability to dive into their data and assess the quality of their traffic, we made substantial improvements to their analytics infrastructure. We implemented the latest in progressive tracking procedures, including custom segments that identify critical on-site behavior. We also added new user behavior event tracking (add to cart, clicked related items, logged in), and set up conversion tracking for Facebook to allow CamelBak to optimize their campaign spend toward reaching specific conversion points. Additionally, we leveled up their advertising technology (ad-tech) stack to handle cart abandonment and uncover insights beyond clickstream behavior. Data from Google Analytics and their other ad-tech technologies will be invaluable for improving future promotions, merchandising, and advertising campaigns.