Case Study

Black Crows

How a Ski Retailer Built a Web App to Outperform the Competition

Introduction

Black Crows is a retailer based in Chamonix, France that designs and sells ski equipment and apparel in-stores and online. They needed to build an eCommerce web app to reach additional customers and increase online sales.

Industry

Retail

Headquarters

Chamonix, France

Platforms

Web (Responsive App)

Services

Discovery
Development
Design
Quality Assurance

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Challenges

Black Crows needed a trusted partner to develop, design, test and deploy a premiere online shopping experience in time for the fall shopping season three months away.

Challenges included:

Building a leading e-commerce platform.
Improving online conversion rates.
Optimizing and enhancing the customer’s mobile experience.
Expanding the shopping platform into international markets with multilingual and multi-currency support.
Ensuring fast load speeds.
Being able to scale and handle traffic surges during busy shopping seasons.

Process

Discovery

To overcome these challenges, Black Crows teamed up with Rangle to build a custom, responsively designed web app to work across all platforms and devices.

The project kicked off with a discovery session led by Rangle that used Lean UX and Agile development methodologies to storyboard an extensive project plan. This allowed Black Crows to have insight into and prioritize the tasks that needed to be completed within the compressed timeframe.

Development and Design

This collaborative and transparent workflow extended into the project’s next stages – design and development. Core principles that guided decisions during this stage included emphasizing continuous flows to purchase, leveraging next-generation technology, incorporating Lean UX and adopting a mobile-first approach.

Quality Assurance

Ongoing prioritization, weekly software releases and frequent testing ensured all deliverables remained on-track with the highest quality and performance levels possible.

“Design and development: in the same room, in the same meetings, on the same tasks… A mutual understanding that blended the need for speed and code simplicity with design concerns.”

Chris Booth, Global Marketing Manager, Black Crows

What We Built

The integration of discovery, design, development and quality assurance resulted in an industry-leading eCommerce web app using AngularJS. The customer experience was further improved by using a simple API to implement critical features like inventory, cart, checkout and payments.

From the intuitively designed homepage, to a simple shopping cart checkout, to shredding powder on the slopes with new Black Crows merchandise, customers now thoroughly enjoy the buyer journey. The app provides a seamless omnichannel shopping experiences regardless of platform, device, location, language, currency and purchase journey.

With advanced analytics built into the web app, Black Crows now has the data needed to make informed sales and marketing decisions to maximize profits and increase brand awareness.

Outcome

Black Crows is very pleased with increased sales and user engagement resulting from the web app, as demonstrated by comparing post-launch analytics vs. the previous year.

“Rangle was able to deliver our project six weeks earlier than other vendors who use Waterfall project management. We knew we would get the best and cleanest codebase with the most modern thinking. Now everything suddenly feels possible with the right tech stack.”

Chris Booth, Global Marketing Manager, Black Crows