Paddling gear gets a fresh look and a fast experience.

​The team at Mercutio and Kokatat have worked together over 7 years. The team that built their Magento 1 site almost five years ago is still supporting Kokatat’s online presence. As their M1 site approached the end of its useful life, Kokatat needed to find a new ecommerce platform to drivethe brand and online business forward,and their leadership asked the Mercutio team to define the future for the Kokatat website.

The launch of their original Magento site was Kokatat’s first foray into ecommerce. There was a lot to learn and a massive opportunity to grasp. Over the past few years, Kokatat has seen solid growth in their online business. At the same time, the brand has seen great success in creating engaging content experiences and using their athlete team to create a formative online presence.

Now, the sequel is better than the original.

Given the learnings over the past few years, the new site has a fresh look and uses BigCommerce as the ecommerce platform with Contentful driving the content management.​

The project began, as most do, with Mercutio and Kokatat working together to define requisite features, requirements and user experience necessities through a Discovery process. Since this was the second time around for the Mercutio project team, we were able to take a number of lessons from the last few years and apply them to this project. Goals for an updated customer experience included streamlining the checkout process, creating a stronger mobile experience and updating taxonomy based on customer behavior. The design process began with creating an updated sitemap and wireframes to define the experience in a way that was easy to discuss and modify. Following the UX exploration, we created a full set of mockups for both mobile and desktop to make sure the experience communicated the tenants of the Kokatat brand while also including key UX elements to make the site easily shoppable.

Next came the custom suit builder. Over the past few years, the custom suit tool has become Kokatat’s primary driver of dry suit sales. Our job was to create an experience where customers can select colors and options, and view changes to their suit in real time, letting them know how the finished product will appear. Additionally, sleeve length and inseam can be tailored for each custom suit, requiring the tool to accept custom measurements, and then recommend the appropriate size and any needed adjustments. With some of the suits there are nearly 100 different configurable options and colors, and we wanted to make sure that all options were shown to the customer prior to purchase.

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Kokatat is a content powerhouse, and the blog, team and expedition sections of the site needed to be supported by a strong CMS. Contentful powered the content aspects of the site, providing a robust and easy way to manage a high volume of content and also merchandise it with products. Our reverse headless approach was used, with BigCommerce driving the performance of the site and Contentful managing the content.

Knect, Mercutio’s proprietary integration platform, brought it all together by integrating with Kokatat’s custom ERP system for orders, customers and inventory information. Additionally, Knect provided the ability to provide availability information to the customer at the variant level in BigCommerce. This circumvents a limitation within the BigCommerce platform and allows customers to availability of products at the color/size level, and place backorders for products which are out of stock. Stoked to have the site live, (check it out here).