Storyblok and Centra revolutionizing Horse Pilot’s B2B platform

Headquarters: Cysoing, France
Technology Stack: Centra, Next.js, Vercel, JavaScript

Horse Pilot is a French brand specializing in high-performance clothing and equipment for horse riders. Their products are designed to be breathable, warm, and protective, making riding comfortable and stylish.

The company is known for its commitment to quality and innovation. Hence, they wanted to convey these values on their digital platform. Additionally, Horse Pilot needed to redesign their eCommerce store to offer an outstanding user experience for their customers. They did so with the help of Ultro, Storyblok's solution partner. The agency developed the company's new, multidimensional platform with Storyblok and Centra. After only 2 months of the digital transformation, Horse Pilot gained a future-proof and scalable B2B in 4 languages. The website achieved an outstanding 98% Google SEO Lighthouse score and 97% of Google Lighthouse Accessibility.

In search of the perfect B2B technology mix

The company's previous website was running on WordPress and WooCommerce. Then, they switched to PrestaShop as the eCommerce layer. The team noticed that it was hard to scale and develop the website's functionality with this tech architecture.

Additionally, managing the content entries to expand internationally took a lot of work. Finally, Horse Pilot's platform needed a visual and technical redesign to convey their brand identity. Here are the challenges Horse Pilot struggled with:

• The need for a new eCommerce layer: The company's previous webshop solutions didn't fulfill Horse Pilot's technical needs. Their dynamic B2B nature required a functional and scalable integration with an eCommerce platform. This would let them scale their product offer to reach their target group.
• Internationalization issues: Horse Pilot's goal was to expand internationally. Hence, they needed to find a solution to store and publish their content in many languages. Their multilingual website goal was hard to achieve with their previous technology stack.
• Scalability blockers: The company wanted to create landing pages for product and collection launches. But, managing content entries by WordPress required a cumbersome coding process. This was causing difficulties in the flexible website scaling.
• The SEO challenge: The previous Horse Pilot's website already had good search engine results. Yet, the company wanted to find a way to enhance them even further based on new solutions. Hence, they were looking for a new CMS that would allow them to expand their SEO strategy. What's important - without compromising on achieved positioning and keyword results.
• The need for easy editing and workflows: The company needed a solution that would allow its marketers to create and edit content freely and independently. They also needed advanced publishing workflows, such as publication scheduling.

Embarking on Horse Pilot's digital ride

The project aimed to set up a modern CMS that would go well with an effective eCommerce system. From the beginning, Ultro planned to use Storyblok and connect it with Centra. They were confident that this combination would meet the website's content and B2B challenges. So, they recommended the solution to Horse Pilot. As a result, this step led to the successful completion of the project in two months.

• The integration of Storyblok and Centra remarkably improved Horse Pilot's B2B platform. This combination gave the company an efficient and functional eCommerce system. It allows the team to easily manage product information and a streamlined checkout process, which led to a notable sales increase. Still, all product information is managed through Storyblok.
• With Storyblok, the company could manage their translated content in various languages. They created content redirects inside the CMS, pulling the data information from Centra. This way, they're able to expand their international strategy.
• Thanks to Storyblok's SEO templates and content structuring, Horse Pilot extended their content optimization strategy. As a result, the page achieved a remarkable 98% SEO Lighthouse score.
• Storyblok's scalability features allowed Horse Pilot to introduce their new collections. This ensured that the new product pages remained consistent throughout the platform. Thanks to this, they can offer a seamless user experience for their clients.
• Marketers frequently use pre-made and reusable content blocks and templates. In total, Ultro created 54 reusable blocks within Storyblok, empowering Horse Pilot's content team to work independently from developers.

Horse Pilot’s multimedia makeover

Horse Pilot wanted to enhance their website with beautiful images and multimedia to convey their brand's message. Before, they did so with Quick Pics, a multimedia provider solution. But, with Storyblok, Ultro found a more efficient way to host the company's visual assets. The agency connected Vercel Image Optimization with the CMS, which enabled Horse Pilot to host and manage multimedia. This functionality optimizes and automatically adjusts images for different device screen sizes, ensuring a consistent and uninterrupted user experience. Ultro developed this solution using Storyblok's API, which let them seamlessly integrate the DAM solution.

Storyblok as the keystone for a powerful B2B strategy

Currently, 4 team members of Horse Pilot use Storyblok on a daily basis. Thanks to the CMS’s intuitive nature, they’re able to manage and edit content entries completely independently from Ultro, which was one of the project’s goals. They still have brave plans on expanding their website’s features based on Storyblok, such as building a store locator with all the necessary information about their physical points of sales, as well as creating a corporate blog. After the long journey of looking for the perfect CMS for their B2B platform, Storyblok turned out to be the one-stop solution, also serving as the connector of all their needed technology integrations.