ZaneRay and Yeti Cycles: Headless In 2020
We were happy to learn that The ZaneRay Group was selected as the winner of the 2020 Headless Award by BigCommerce for our work on the Yeti Cycles site. The BigCommerce Partner Awards program recognizes top performing agency and technology partners for their innovative work with BigCommerce merchants.
It is no secret that ZaneRay is chock full of bike enthusiasts. It is a huge part of our company culture, which has in turn led us to work with a number of cycling companies throughout the years. When we began working with Yeti Cycles, they brought the same level of intensity and focus to enhancing their digital channel as they do to making and riding bikes. When you work with a brand who is at the very top of their field, there are expectations to create the best of the best, which is what we aspired to do for this project. The ‘best’ in this case, meant focusing our efforts to create and design dynamic brand experiences that best translated the stories of Yeti to their digital channel. Yeti Cycles knows exactly who they are as a brand and that focus helped us identify the nuances that are uniquely ‘Yeti’, presenting them in a way that is inspiring to their community and true to who they are as a brand.
Though Yeti Cycles is an e-commerce site, the focus and purpose of the site is to introduce people to the experiences that these bikes provide and the culture that the brand represents. In order to create these dynamic storytelling experiences, we needed to leverage the full spectrum of capabilities of a robust Content Management System coupled with detailed product data from the BigCommerce catalog. A headless architecture allowed us to do what otherwise would not have been possible using only the BigCommerce platform. Leveraging the CMS allowed us to infuse dynamic content and narrative into the shopping experience, using Yeti’s world-class imagery to design cohesive and purposeful animations that provide a new range of depth and life to their stories. Coupling that with the BigCommerce robust API’s, resulted in an overall optimized and highly branded shopping interface. Another huge advantage for Yeti is the administrative capabilities for the team to be able to manage their site, create additional experiences, without requiring additional development resources. A complete change from their previous website.
ZaneRay was an early adopter of the headless architecture and we have designed and developed a number of headless sites to date. We also have gained enough expertise to know when it is warranted and when it is not, based on the branding and business needs, both present and future. We are proud to win this particular award from BigCommerce given how much we have invested in innovating in the Headless framework. The Yeti Cycles site is a great example of the promise of Headless, and BigCommerce has truly invested heavily in supporting this architecture.
Thank you to Yeti Cycles for being such a great partner. Your commitment to breaking the rules is inspiring and we have enjoyed breaking them with you. We’d also like to thank BigCommerce for selecting ZaneRay for this award and we truly appreciate and value this partnership and dedication to building a platform that is open to support these types of experiences.