- Design & Strategy
A kick-ass new website and D2C launch
- Client
- Kicking Horse Coffee
- Location
- Invermere, British Columbia, Canada
- Work
UX/UI
Strategy
Web Development
Growth & Ongoing Support
- Summary
Kicking Horse Coffee is a well-known North American coffee brand. In 2020, after years as a dominant retail force, they wanted to stake their rightful claim online.
- Our Approach
- Detailed project requirements and solution architecture
- Comprehensive wireframes and high fidelity designs for mobile and desktop
- Integrated platform with Shopify, Sanity, Netlify, Gatsby
- Custom content management solution built with Sanity.io
- Custom frontend built on the JAMSTACK (Gatsby)
Threads
"The task at hand? Take the Kicking Horse Coffee brand and bring it to life as an online experience. Pixel Union (now known as Knit) followed a clear and efficient process to understand our needs, proposed a brilliant solution, and kept us on track from discovery to go-live and beyond. A collaborative relationship built on trust and expertise. Thank you!"
Anne-Sophie Champagne
Brand & Communications Manager, Kicking Horse Coffee
The approach
01Content management liberation
Content is critical fuel for Kicking Horse Coffee. Together we imagined a site that allowed pages to be added however and whenever needed, that could accommodate custom content types, and be administered independently by the internal team with ease. Then we built it. Sanity.io CMS provided expansive control over all page-building solutions and our headless stack enabled the team carte blanche when it came to delivering relevant and varied content to their coffee consuming audiences.
02Fresh, yet familiarly flavoured design
The Kicking Horse Coffee team wanted to hone in on creating a seamless, branded shopping experience with a full redesign of the corporate website. Working collaboratively with the Kicking Horse Coffee design team we brewed up an incredible new design for the launch of their first D2C channel. The site incorporates a modern aesthetic and best practices in ecommerce, accessibility, and UX/UI design. And, we managed to keep the “household name” feeling at the forefront, which has proven to be a familiar and comfortable transition for their loyal, in-store consumers and a welcoming and inviting brand experience for their newly reached online audiences.
The impact
01A successful launch into D2C across Canada and the United States
Kicking Horse Coffee is now selling online direct to consumers in multiple markets. We helped them launch into this critical sales channel by building a site using headless architecture that is completely manageable and scalable for the future. They now have one digital flagship for their products across Canada and the United States.
02Expanded control and increased efficiency
The flexibility of site content administration now appreciated by Kicking Horse Coffee is far beyond anything that was available natively within their previous ecommerce platform. The new expanded degree of control and unconstrained functionality allows their team to safely draft, publish and manage site content. Their team can now operate with cross-functional efficiencies in their marketing, product management, design and development.
