Brief
Trutex are the UK’s favourite school uniform supplier. By launching Akoa.co.uk, a kit designer and builder for school sports kits they were set to revolutionise the school sports clothing market.
Typically, in the offline world, the decision making process for bulk buying team kit is complicated and protracted, taking weeks to complete. Trutex wanted to create a website that offered customers the opportunity to design, order and pay for school sports kits collaboratively and quickly.
Crucially for the project, the e-commerce website and kit builder marked an entry to the market for new brand Akoa; CTI delivered an industry-first website that exceeded all expectations.
Technology
CTI set about blending technologies in a way that had never been done before. The end game was to produce a kit builder site that offered the ability to design every aspect of their new sports kit on line. Customers could then choose whether to pay on line or at a local retailer.
CTI knew that the core target audience of school staff use web browsers that are incompatible with HTML5, this had a significant impact on all aspects of how they approached the brief. Furthermore building the kit builder in Flash would offer a richer user experience and more realistic colours.
The truly revolutionary part of the build was to combine Magento with Flash so that the kit builder application could integrate fully with the rest of the site, allowing data to feed into the ordering system so that the application could deliver real commercial benefit. This level of integration using the technologies had never been done before.
Another first for the industry was the customer being able to place bulk orders online. To achieve this the site fully automated the end to end process – from warehouse to customer. The side effect of this functionality was a huge amount of data being exported into the Magento system; it was this integration that was key to the success of the project.
Benefits & Results
With a strong opening month of sales that saw 2000 unique visits to the website revenue grew 350% in just three months. The sleek design and appealing UX led to users spending an average of 6 minutes on the website.
A huge breakthrough for Akoa is the reduction of the customer journey time; previously converting an initial enquiry into a sale took months, now it takes a few hours.
A real-time data feed ensures stock control and management prohibiting customers ordering anything that the client cannot deliver on immediately.
The collaborative functionality has been crucial to the success of the build with 98% of I.D numbers being used by more than one unique user.
Solutions
The integration that CTI achieved with the Akoa.co.uk stock control data feed allowed the website to react second by second to warehouse supply. For instance, if any particular colour was out of stock, the kit builder reacts and adapts the colour palette to only display what is available. Additional functionality allows the client, at the touch of a button, to remove colours, patterns and designs should anything be discontinued.
