For more than three decades, Benchmade has been known for producing high-quality knives for a wide range of uses—everyday carry, hunt, rescue, tactical, outdoor, and survival. They launched their online store in 2018 on Magento Commerce Cloud, but wanted to tap into the unique growth opportunity that arrived in 2020: The pandemic shifted consumer trends in favor of outdoor brands, as more people spent time outside.
Benchmade’s short-term goal was to maximize US revenue and grow into the Canadian market. In the long-run, they aimed for large-scaled growth both domestic and international. It was important that they maintained brand integrity as they scaled their business, since the company already had a devout following. Already being backed by the Cloud, we saw plenty of opportunities to enhance what was already working, and redesign what wasn’t.
After an in-depth discovery process, we found several opportunities for Benchmade to scale, as well as enhance customer experience and increase recurring revenue. From our findings, we designed a revamped Home page, enhanced product pages and descriptions, upgraded their site search (from Klevu, one of our partners), set up subscription services, added custom shipping and “Back in Stock” alerts, and more.
One truly unique feature that we contributed to was a product customizer, which allows customers to view different options of the same product, such as a knife that comes in multiple colors.
In terms of scaling, Benchmade was already ahead of the game because one of the key benefits to hosting an Adobe Commerce Cloud store on AWS, as they were, is AWS Auto Scaling. This feature allowed us to take advantage of growth resources and opportunities because it automatically responds to changes in demand. In turn, this freed up resources, allowing us to put costs toward other growth initiatives like SEO, and allocate more resources to global market expansion and brand reputation.
