Masterbuilt & Kamado Joe
- Product UI/UX Design
- User Experience Research
- Website Design & Development
- Outdoor Living
What If…
We fueled grilling brands for growth to be leaders in outdoor living
Following acquisition by leading PE firm Middleby, outdoor living brands Masterbuilt and Kamado Joe were hungry to come out of the pandemic with some heat. So, we wondered if we could work together to craft a scalable, mobile-first ecom experience and digital strategy that could live up to the same innovative standards people expect from the products, and that could inspire people to cook at home instead of going out.
We Did
Craft a fire digital brand experience.
Working with the collective teams at both Masterbuilt and Kamado Joe, we were able to create a brand new modular design system built on the leading ecommerce platform Shopify Plus to serve customers, clients, and the market in a bold new way – enabling both brands to drive new forms of growth and demand through digital channels.
- +60%
- Increase in sales revenue through digital channels
- +5%
- Increase in AOV
Measure once, cut twice. Building a blueprint for digital experiences with scale in mind.
Working with two well-established brands already online today, we needed to be thoughtful with how we would architect a new, modular solution that enabled us to best balance discoverability (SEO), technical requirements (debt avoidance), and usability (UX) for all users involved. We began our engagement with a rigorous data and experience audit to help us benchmark each property respectively while facilitating various co-creation workshops and listening sessions with stakeholders across both brands. This allowed us to determine and shape an overall strategy to best serve the team’s short and long-term digital marketing while delivering a best-in-class customer journey and experience.
A true, mobile-first user experience.
While most brands have an experience that’s serviceable for users on mobile devices, few still build their experiences from the ground up on one. To support a well-rounded digital strategy that could match customers’ shopping and consumption behaviors both in aisles and in front of their grill afterward, we opted for a true mobile-first methodology that could make key content and CTAs fast, fluid, and always within a thumb’s reach.
Maximizing modularity through a component-driven approach to design & development.
Designing a modular design system is one thing, but being able to apply it to and within a platform that can fully take advantage of it is an entirely separate ballgame. To maximize the team’s ability to scale their digital CX across both brands and all respective product lines with ease, we leveraged Shopify Plus with a mix of other progressive, CRM-focused integrations to create a powerful martech stack that was as efficient as it was effective when it came to scale.
Leveling up the customer experience with interaction design.
Any grillmaster will tell you the sizzle is just as important as the steak itself. When you’re in the business of outdoor living, entertainment, and dining, one of the most effective ways to drive engagement is by making the experience for customers visceral. That means turning up the dial to 10 using interactivity to show off the craftsmanship and quality of the grills to the mouth-watering meats themselves.
A modular design system that masterfully blends form and function.
If we were going to help Middleby put a stake (or steak?) in the ground with their commitment to digital strategy and ecommerce, they needed a design system that could drive it. As such, we built and branded a fully robust, React.js atomic design system (via Storybook) which we named the “Firestarter Design System” as a living asset library that the team could manage, update, and deploy to the main Shopify themes for any and all future digital products and services.
The Digital Surgeons team delivered not only a fresh new UI/UX, but an experience that drastically improved our consumer engagement and conversions on site. We are thrilled with the results!
