A modern approach to growing a heritage brand
Buck Knives is one of the heritage brands that ZaneRay has had the pleasure to work with for quite some time now, and many of us have a very distinct connection to the brand from our childhood. Some of us still own the first Buck Knife given to us as a kid. Not only is it a heritage brand, but it is a durable good that has been expertly forged to stand the test of time. Buck is truly an institution that is deeply intertwined with American culture, and it all comes out of its headquarters in Post Falls, Idaho.
Challenge
A Modern Tech Stack to Support a Growing Brand
Though the previous site served them very well, the time had come to move Buck Knives onto a more modern tech stack that would provide them with all of the amazing features, benefits, and extensibility of being on a leading Open SaaS platform like BigCommerce. Buck Knives has some complex business rules and BigCommerce’s API-first composable platform provided the best solution to help Buck Knives continue to grow its eCommerce business in the near and long-term.
Influence of Approach
For Buck Knives, they needed a flagship site that would not only deliver the best brand experience for their customers but one that was also optimized to sell. The new site also needed to provide unique offerings and reasons to shop directly with the brand.
Our Approach
A Composable Framework to Support Future Growth
One of ZaneRay’s areas of expertise is in building unique shopping tools and offerings that are designed to provide an exclusive customer experience on a brand’s flagship website. For Buck to support these custom shopping experiences and unique offerings, they needed to move into a headless framework that would not only support their current needs but also future business services and experiences.
Design Approach
Having worked with Buck through iterations of their site, our team had already established a great foundation to improve upon. When it came to designing the new site, ZaneRay was directly involved in helping make art direction recommendations for the new product and lifestyle photography that would align with the new design system that was created for the new site. With a heritage brand, sometimes the design challenge is determining how we best present the heritage brand in a modern UI that is optimized to sell.
Unique Design Solutions
This re-platforming project offered Buck and ZaneRay a chance to revisit the product photography to the point of making recommendations for product shot angles that would show better detail of the knives in the alt images on the PDP combined with lifestyle images that showed the scale and size of the product while being held in someone's hand. This required new product photography, a new brand pallet, and a general modernization of the brand experience on the new site. Some other unique design solutions were created for particular variations in the knives. For example, the 110 Folding Hunter Knife, which is one of Buck’s most popular knives, only has one color option, but there is a finger-grooved option that is visually represented with a symbol within the color swatches that reflects that option. This is an example of a unique design solution that is also rooted in eCommerce best practices. Our team’s knowledge of eCommerce best practices allows the designers to push the boundaries of creativity by offering unique design solutions to challenges that are specific to the brand, or in this case, a particular product.
Unique Offerings and Experiences
A Knife Configurator Like No Other
ZaneRay rebuilt the Custom Knife Configurator for the new site. The custom knife configurator was also available on their previous site, however, our team built out a more dynamic version of the tool for the new site experience. The knife configurator is designed to work seamlessly across all devices. The new custom knife configurator utilizes a more streamlined data configuration, significantly improving the data entry on the customer side.
The configurator supports an infinite amount of customizations. One of the unique features was an image stack renderer that builds the logic and renders the customizations onto the UI. Ensuring that this was all done in a responsive way was quite difficult and a great accomplishment. The buck knives configurator is unique compared to other custom configurators. The ZaneRay team took it as far as they could without switching to a 3D rendering engine. Because we are utilizing real images versus computer-generated rendering, the custom knife imagery is presented with real images that are closest to what the knife will be when the customer receives it. There is a significant amount of effort required to do it that way, however, this is a level of detail that does have a direct impact on purchase decisions.
Technology Solutions
ZaneRay was an early adopter of Headless. Many brands we work with come to us with unique and complex business requirements that often require us to leverage a composable framework that better supports an evolving and growing business.
Success
The Buck Knives site is a great example of a unique and premium e-commerce experience that builds the brand while also selling products on a highly performant e-commerce site. Since the Buck Knives team started working every month with ZaneRay’s Customer Success team, they experienced significant growth. In the three years Buck worked with ZaneRay’s Customer Success team, their revenue grew by 148%, conversions were up 27%, transactions grew by 101%, and AOV was up 23%. Since re-platforming onto BigCommerce, they have continued to see growth in just a short amount of time. They have experienced growth on the new headless site, with a 10% increase in revenue, a 0.3% increase in conversions, and an increase in AOV of just over 20%.
Brand Domain Through Thought Leadership
With a rich heritage, stemming from innovation and know-how, Buck continues to serve their customers as a hub for useful information related to its products and the outdoors. That wealth of practical knowledge can be traced down to its founder, Hoyt Buck.
Through its blog and 'About' section, Buck provides a treasure trove of well-organized content, full of rich storytelling, detailed information, photography and video.
Buck Knives serves its customers as a go-to source of knife know-how – from selecting the perfect knife and understanding blade shapes and materials, to how to best maintain your knife over time.
Buck's brand heritage comes through in it storytelling, presented through an attractive editorial style
When we started this project in 2022 we understood the risks and effort required in rebuilding the cornerstone of our marketing and eCommerce strategies. It became clear very quickly that the choice to continue our partnership with ZaneRay was the right choice. They understood our products, our challenges and our customers. Developing this site with ZaneRay was a fantastic experience for us. Their team of experts in engineering, design, UX, SEO and systems administrations were with us every step of the way working through the challenges and changes as they emerged. The effort and attention to detail given to us by this team was evident at launch. We saw an immediate improvement in conversion, revenue and AOV. To say we are happy is an understatement. The site not only provides a smooth experience for shoppers, but beautifully showcases the products and stories that are dear to everyone’s experience with our brand. We are excited to continue the relationship with ZaneRay in developing our eCommerce strategy well into the future.
Conclusion
ZaneRay has had the pleasure of working with Buck Knives through multiple iterations of their website for many years now. For a heritage brand like Buck, owning the brand experience while also offering unique shopping experiences and exclusive offerings is critical to connecting with their customers, and bringing them back to the site. The goal of this project was to position Buck Knives well for future growth, and BigCommerce proved to be the right partner to support a headless site warranted by the complexity of the build and business requirements. Our team continues to work with Buck to identify opportunities for growth as they continue to grow a heritage brand in the modern age.
