Eco Outdoor Crafted with wonder
Insight
Elevating beyond bricks and mortar.
Eco Outdoor offers a beautiful range of natural architectural surfaces and a crafted furniture collection, designed for outdoor living. Since 2001, the Australian-founded global brand has serviced architects, designers and builders, with a focus on collaboration and creating long-lasting relationships.
Eco Outdoor has always focused on using its showrooms to showcase some of the world’s finest products and building expertise through exceptional face-to-face client service. But as Eco Outdoor continues to scale and move into markets without any physical showrooms, a digital experience that delivers the same level of service and inspiration is crucial.
As Eco Outdoor prepares for sustained global growth, it became clear the need to better leverage systems, service models and the team through an entirely new digital strategy and future-state client experience.
Idea
A unique blueprint for a new era of expansion.
Informed by a deep assessment of the existing experience, stakeholder workshops, qualitative research and business objectives, Eco Outdoor’s digital experience was defined. The digital brand mirrors the excellence of the physical experience while enabling future growth.
As part of the digital transformation strategy, AKQA developed a prioritised roadmap of initiatives and outlined the technology ecosystem required to underpin them. This spans across retained and replaced MarTech platforms, covering CMS, DAM, search, e-commerce, CRM, analytics and personalisation.
The first phase of the digital transformation journey is to set the foundations with a fully responsive, intuitive and beautifully designed website. The new website enables visitors to more easily source a wider variety of content, and facilitate trigger communications to better connect with existing and potential clients.
A design system, curated for designers.
AKQA created a design system aptly named EO Materials. The dynamic library of UI components are designed with subtle beauty and intuitive movement, for both online and offline use.
Concept validation testing, tree testing, and actioning on the pieces of feedback were key to shaping an experience that best responds to and connects with clients.
Technology foundations, both future-proof and flexible.
AKQA replatformed the existing website, which had an extensive amount of legacy plug-ins, into a streamlined headless technology stack that delivers a frictionless experience. A decoupled front-end and back-end provides the ability to support growth and enhancements across new features such as e-commerce, client personalisation, lead generation nurturing and the integration of AI features.
Impact
The first phase in an inspirational digital transformation journey.
Benefits of the redefined and replatformed experience include greater understanding and segmentation of audiences through data, as well as accelerating growth through new and existing clients.
Additionally, a curated technology stack of industry-leading solutions that is both easy and simple to use empowers Eco Outdoor staff to have greater autonomy and flexibility in editing existing and creating new content, and the ability to continue to enhance the digital experience over time.
As the foundations are now set for stability and scalability, this digital ecosystem for Eco Outdoor will support and maintain global expansion into the future.
