Starboard is a world-leading watersports brand with over 30 years of heritage, founded in 1994 with a vision of bringing innovation, quality, and inspiration to the world of wind and water. They specialise in innovative equipment for SUP, windsurfing, and wingfoiling, loved by enthusiasts worldwide.
We project managed and migrated them from a basic static catalog style WordPress site to a high-powered Shopify Plus store, creating expansion stores enabling their distributors to sell DTC for the first time. Big shift in foundational business strategy from what they have been doing for 30 years.
Services Rendered
- Shopify Plus
- Shopify development PM
- Expansion into new markets
- Product data optimisation
- Shopify Premium Apps
- Shopify Native Apps
- TablePress data tables
- Matrixify bulk data Management
- Mailchimp email marketing
- Google Analytics
- Google Looker Studio
Challenge
Starboard is a global watersports brand widely recognised and world leader, with a footprint in many countries. They sell through a global distributor network who then have a local dealer network of their own. This meant distributors had no way to engage, sell and position the brand within their markets effectively. They relied and were heavily dependent on dealers (shops) who held this relationship. In a dynamic and fast-moving sales landscape and as competition in the market intensified, Starboard needed to find a better way to reach and service their customers.
Solution
After meeting with Starboard we understood their requirements, assessed and presented a solution that fit their needs. We then implemented Shopify Plus as we knew they were going to need many dedicated expansion stores to support each of their distributors for their respective territories. Further, a Standard Shopify plan was not enough as it was also identified they had custom checkout requirements unique to their sales business model – which is available on the Shopify Plus plan.
We then went to work creating a master Shopify store where the custom theme development was developed, fine tuned and approved. We also strategically optimised product and collection data here for optimal surfacing across search engines (SEO) and AI (Agentic) search enquiries (GEO).
They also had requirements to present large amounts of product information, so we implemented TablePress for Product Data Tables that was user friendly for their team and customisable to fit their brand CI.
For marketing we also implemented product reviews with Ryviu: Product Reviews App and run direct marketing with Mailchimp email newsletters.
Results
We have successfully deployed their main Shopify store, and deployed to several markets within the EU while supporting distributors accelerate their onboarding experience, project managed getting inventory API integrations done with their ERPs and develop new digital marketing capabilities that they never had before.
We are now working to expand to more markets in North America (USA and Canada) and South East Asia via their distribution partner based in Singapore.
Our team supports Starboard with further roll-outs, ongoing e-commerce maintenance and digital marketing strategy.