KÜHL
Pandemic-Proof e-Commerce Strategy
Capicua took KÜHL’s marketing processes to the next level with a thriving combination of design, development, and strategy in a challenging context.
Mission
Established in 1990 by a group of outdoor sports enthusiasts, KÜHL is a Utah-based clothing company. With a strong wildlife love, it offers high-quality hiking pants, shorts, performance shirts, outerwear, and overall outdoor clothing within its catalog.
Impact
While the company works with different hiking-related items, such as articulated knees, gussets, stretch panels, and reinforced pockets, its differential factor is its products' durability and long life. As a result, its clothes keep up with its users’ lifestyles.
Services
Capicua’s initial engagement with KÜHL was focused on graphic design, enclosing from physical elements like labels to marketing materials such as email marketing assets. Yet, the scope of this partnership expanded to include Project Management and, later on, full-on front-end development for its website.
Goal
The main goal of this project was to upgrade KÜHL’s vision in terms of both technological use and graphic branding.
Story
It was in 1990 that a group of outdoor sports enthusiasts started KÜHL in Wasatch Mountains, Utah. Since then, KÜHL has defined itself as an independent brand: it has no shareholders or VC investors, and it has no private equity, paid celebrities, or athletes.
Likewise, the challenging geographical conditions of its place of birth were key in teaching the team behind KÜHL that independence can thrive with courage and humility.
The combination of these values has still risen as a powerful competitive advantage over thirty years since the brand’s foundation, with clients as the biggest asset and customer satisfaction as the growth fuel.
Challenges
The first step of our partnership with KÜHL was to support their team with design assets for marketing materials such as email marketing campaigns.
Our work with this goal further allowed us to detect some inefficiencies in both graphic and UX UI design that led to last-minute rushes, so a new challenge of optimizing procedures arose.
This optimization process unveiled weaknesses within the priorly selected stack for KÜHL’s website (Python + Django). At that moment, development, deployment, and maintenance processes ended up slowing down changes and launches.
With a request to re-develop the site more efficiently, our team also had the challenge of selecting a state-of-the-art stack to solve all needs in the long term.
Strategy
Strategically, we blended art and technology to deliver a solid rebranding of the KÜHL brand with a cleaner, more contemporary look and feel. To start, our team provided KÜHL with templates with a variety of creative choices.
This procedure allowed the company to dynamically iterate design proposals to answer specific segments' needs more efficiently. This combination led to the brand being able to offer end-to-end, unified experiences across platforms and processes.
UX UI Design
Our team relied on KÜHL’s style guidelines to ensure no changes would feel abrupt for its long-term customers. Yet, we thrived in aligning marketing materials with UX UI Design best practices to develop cleaner interfaces.
With our thorough analysis, we developed a design system that allowed the company to speed up changes and iterations.
Technology
Besides our work on UX UI Design, where we relied on Figma to develop complete design systems for each screen and interaction, we further proposed and implemented a tech stack transition in development terms.
Instead of the at-the-moment used Python + Django stack, we strategically chose React for the front-end using Next.js mainly because the back-end was not defined, allowing us to leverage Next’s server-side rendering and connect it to either the current structure or evolve into a new, specific back-end suite.
Worth Mentioning
We worked on both the maintenance of the current site and the development of a new one in parallel, where we incorporated UX UI design updates. The new site was launched in mid-2023, with improved site speed, an optimized development process, and much positive feedback.
Since our first encounter, we have developed an excellent relationship with KÜHL, which is why we keep collaborating on the company’s projects and initiatives.
With Capicua as a key partner in its e-commerce and digital marketing strategies, KÜHL was able to maintain an 80% rate of online sales in spite of the most difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
