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Leading Marine
Equipment Manufacturer
Introducing Lewmar - the Brand and History
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Client
lewmar.com
Year
2024 - Present
Services
Platform Migration, Design & Magento Build
Platform
Magento 2 with Hyvä
Lewmar began its life back in 1950, when it was established by Len Lewery and Leslie Marsh, with Len Lewrey making dinghy fittings since 1946. When it was purchased by John Burton in 1967, it began the course of Lewmar’s life as it now, and he helped turn the company into the world leader of modern yacht equipment. Over the next decades, Lewmar evolved to rigging, windlass, steering, hatch and portlights, and they began selling their products all over the globe, obtaining three Queen’s Awards, among many other accolades.
Over the years, Lewmar have been innovators in their field, breaking records, winning numerous awards and using their legendary quality with state-of-the-art innovation to create advanced equipment for yachts and boats. Today, Lewmar, under the Lippert brand, is the premier marine equipment supplier, designing, manufacturing and distributing innovative, high-quality control solutions worldwide.
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Wind & Kite and Lewmar
Lewmar approached Wind & Kite in 2024 with the objective of moving from their 10-year-old Drupal website to a modern eCommerce platform to refresh the site's aesthetic and give their customers an improved user experience and better functionality to show Lewmar’s exceptional products.
Wind & Kite proposed Magento as the perfect platform for Lewmar’s complex product range, and Hyvä themes to give Lewmar an exceptionally fast base to build from, with the ability to develop new content elements promptly in the future.
A complex scoping exercise took place to determine the optimal way to showcase Lewmar’s complex products to end-users, and an unrivalled B2B experience for their global customer base. End-to-end designs were produced, and feedback was gathered from Lewmar’s global team before starting development efforts.
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Product Complexities
Data Migration
Wind & Kite migrated all the product data from Drupal and worked with Lewmar to sanitise decades worth of unsanitised product data into a cohesive data set.
Downloadable Resources
Lewmar had a huge wealth of resources available for these parts, such as manuals, guides and videos to highlight key features and components for these products. These resources were previously very hard for the customers to obtain and find on the site. Wind & Kite migrated all files and associated them with products, categories and pages to make finding information easier for customers.
Product Code Search
Lewmar’s products can also be searched in numerous ways, including searching using codes found on other products. For example, customers can find the right repair kit or spare item to purchase based on the code shown on the portlight on their boat. Wind & Kite created a page to search by these codes to enable this functionality, by extending all the complex data to be available in the site's main search engine.
Wide Catalog Range
Lewmar has a huge product list with various complicated configurable options for their varied ranges such as size, weight and material. On Lewmar’s previous platform, each configuration of an individual product was a separate page, making it difficult to determine the correct product to purchase and compare the differences between configurations.
Wind & Kite combined the configurations where applicable, allowing customers to see the different options of each product, from simple options like the weight of an anchor to more complex options like the size, finish and power source of an electric winch.
Product Kits
Many of Lewmar’s products are made of numerous parts, such as the fixings for a winch, or the rubber seal for a portlight. Lewmar not only sell the complete item but also the parts of these items to ensure the longevity of their product range. These parts are typically sold in ‘kits’, with the various products linked together. These kits can be complex, related to numerous products and were previously difficult for customers to locate.
Wind & Kite enabled these spares and kits to be clearly shown for the specific products in a user-friendly way.
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Design
During Wind & Kite’s discovery session, it was clear that the team responsible for content would not have been able to use Magento’s built-in content management system (Pagebuilder).
For Wind & Kite to build a unique and visually appealing Magento site, requires some amount of breaking the mould which wouldn’t be practical within the restraints of Pagebuilder.
Wind & Kite wanted to make sure that anyone on the Lewmar marketing team could build beautiful pages without technical knowledge, so proposed a headless Content Management System (CMS), Storyblok.
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High-Quality Imagery
Lewmar is a brand with a huge legacy spreading worldwide, meaning that they had a vast collection of beautiful imagery which was lacking from their old website. High-quality imagery can lead to large file sizes, resulting in slow page speed. Within Magento’s default Page Builder, it is only possible to select a mobile and desktop image.
Wind & Kite wanted to have images for every possible device size to showcase the imagery in the crispest way possible without losing any quality between devices. With Storyblok, Wind & Kite was able to do this for every content block built automatically, resulting in a fast site with beautiful visuals without any tedious manual resizing required by the Lewmar team.
Bespoke Icons & Colour Palette
Wind & Kite’s design team created bespoke icons and a new colour palette to pull the new site together, giving a unique, and high-quality editorial look for the entire website for the customer from start to finish.
Primary Colour
Shades of Grey
Custom Interface Icons
Category Icons
Combining B2B with B2C
Lewmar does not sell directly to the public, instead directing them to their global resellers to purchase. For the public, customers can learn more about Lewmar with new high-quality editorial content, browse for products, read specifications and technical guides for any product and find resellers using the new Dealer Map.
For logged-in business users, the site changes to allow purchases in numerous ways and exposes live stock data to help businesses understand expected delivery dates.
Prices are unique to each businesses, so each member of a business is placed in a group allowing them to browse the site with their unique pricing and currency.
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Businesses will often order hundreds of products at a time, making a standard eCommerce journey unsuitable in some cases. Wind & Kite built a new Bulk Order system, allowing customers to upload spreadsheets with their required order before seeing the results of this and the exact pricing on one page. From here, businesses can check live stock for every product quickly, before deciding on an optimal delivery date and placing the order.
Lewmar customers pay on invoice, making the standard Magento checkout process an unnecessary user experience. Instead, Wind & Kite rewrote the whole process to allow the completion of an order directly from the cart page.
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Making Magento fast with Hyvä Themes
Lewmar’s global reach meant customers visiting from around the world. Internet speeds can vary dramatically in different countries, making a lightweight site a must for a usable site for everyone.
Wind & Kite recommended Hyvä Themes as the best option for a fast base to build from, reducing development and a huge SEO benefit.
Wind & Kite continuously monitored site performance throughout, and are proud to confirm that all pages not only passed core web vitals, but all consistently sat in the 90’s scores on Lighthouse, almost unheard of on a standard Magento site.
Scores taken from Lewmar Product Page
https://www.lewmar.com/windlass-v1-v2-v3-series-kit
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Trade Dashboard
Trade customers require a single place to easily check the status of complex orders, download their unique price list and obtain purchased products.
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Lewmar products are made to last, with some products having a lifetime warranty, meaning that some products from their original range can be replaced decades after purchase.
To complete a Warranty Claim Lewmar needs to establish the facts of how the product is used and the exact nature of the claim. Customers needed to be able to complete the required details in a user-friendly way and search vast amounts of historic products to select the correct one for the claim.
Lewmar administrators can chat with customers about their claims, ask for more information including videos if required, and arrange for repairs and replacements through the Magento Admin system.
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Dealer Map
Due to Lewmar’s global reach, Lewmar distributors are located located around the world.
Once a dealer is selected users can instantly see all contact information for these dealers without leaving the site.
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D365 Integration
Lewmar uses D365 to manage product information, stock, complex pricing rules, customer details and order fulfilment for their global customers.
Customers to view products with their own specific pricing and currency
Customers to be able to clearly see related products to their current one, including the appropriate spare’s kit for an individual item
Product information such as the individual parts of a product to be shown to customers
Customers to check the live stock of any product in real-time.
Magento to push new customer orders to D365 in real-time
D365 to send order updates that customers can view within their dashboard
Product lifecycle management, any product can be discontinued, and a clear message is shown to the customer to suggest an alternative product
Enabling global teams
Wind & Kite delivered in-person training on all new functionality and the Magento admin. This training was curated to enable each department to manage their part of the site, and a few senior staff to work across the entire system.
Regular video calls around go-live and after were used to instantly unblock staff on any pain point and allow them to manage the site themselves.
Lewmar’s team are now able to handle all the day-to-day tasks from product orchestration, order fulfilment, warranty claims and customer services on their own, but we’re a call away for anything they need.
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What Lewmar Say
Working with Wind & Kite has been a joy. They tackled the huge task of migrating our outdated website to Magento, seamlessly integrating it with Microsoft D365. James and his team were fantastic problem solvers, especially when it came to ERP-related hurdles. I highly recommend Wind & Kite and look forward to a long, collaborative relationship as we continue to develop our website with a growth plan.
- Lewmar