King of Watersports + Magnolia

King of Watersports started as a small business offering wetsuits and kite-surfing equipment and as demand grew, so did the range; expanding into more and more varieties of watersports equipment. What started out as a simple merchandising operation on a couple of categories, became a huge pull on the whole marketing function as they wrestled with a greater need for content, imagery, trading and promotions. The site metrics were demonstrating more browsers and fewer conversions, but the site was not fully optimised to attract a greater share of voice.

With growth aspirations clearly pointing towards reach, in terms of more geographical regions, a more effective business model was required, that supported a greater customer experience but efficiencies internally on delivery.

User-friendly design

With a small team, King of Watersports needed an approach to manage the increasing number of assets, the number of potential landing pages and campaigns focused around seasonal peaks and product launches.

Magnolia CMS supported this with its easy-to-use design hub that helped the company’s marketers visualise pages by channel, device, campaign start date and soon its extending locales. With seamless integration, all the assets can be curated together and published as if in one system. 

Magnolia also supported efficiency through effective content architecture, making sure that where possible, content reuse was applied, reducing the preview page templated approach that was causing heavy duplication of content editing.

Intuitive discovery

King of Watersports was also aware, through web analytics, of a need to improve SEO performance, as well as on-site search and navigation. With a growing interest in the watersports category, it became critical to support both the discovery of King of Watersports as well as relevant products and supporting content. 

By bringing together both content and commerce, delivering strong navigation and focusing on more efficient forms of site optimisation, Magnolia and Commercekit together drove huge increases in site traffic, time on-site and page ranking.

Customer feedback has been extremely positive around the new design, which makes it much easier to navigate the extended ranges and understand more about each product category.

Relevant digital experiences

As a brand with a global and diverse customer base, King of Watersports needed a website that could dynamically support different contexts.

With it’s easy to use multi-site features and rich personalisation capabilities, Magnolia has given King of Watersports the ability to personalise content by destination, adjusting currencies, language and on-site content for a more tailored user experience. These personalised features have made the entire sales process much quicker and easier for both King of Watersports’ staff and its customers.

Since the deployment of both Magnolia CMS and Commercekit by Konstructive, King of Watersports has seen huge increases (55%) in site traffic and with that a 14% increase in the amount of time customers are spending browsing the site. With the increased demand, both revenues and average order value have increased and yet the underlying business model hasn’t had to increase with it.