Product customization in Shopify for Kambukka

In Kambukka’s products an emphasis is placed on combining smart design and durability with ease of use and beauty. The Belgian brand specializes in high-quality coffee cups, water bottles and food containers. While searching for a partner that could match their ambition, Kambukka met with Code to set up shop with Shopify. Marketing manager Sabrina Ruzzi talked with us about the past few months working together: “it has been a real relief to implement Shopify with Code.”

CLIENT

Kambukka

INDUSTRY

Lifestyle, Fashion

TECHNOLOGY

Shopify plus webshops

PACKAGE

Webshop migration

Services we provided

Migration

Store Development

UX/UI Design

Internationalization

Develop for two years

for the ultimate user experience

Kambukka worked quietly on its own brand for over two years. The first products entered the market in the spring of 2019. Sabrina explains why Kambukka has put so much time and care into product development: “Usability is everything to us. All our products have smart features such as the patented Snapclean mechanism for easy cleaning. Another example is our food containers with compartments, letting you easily combine ingredients at the right time. We match our products to complement each other: you can, for example, also place the lid of your coffee cup on the insulated bottle designed to keep cold drinks.'

Personalizing designs was a logical next step for Kambukka. But properly conveying all possibilities to customers is challenging, says Sabrina. “A customer wants to see the real product with his or her design on it. You need good tech for that: a 'configurator' that shows what your unique design will end up looking like.'

So, Kambukka started looking for an experienced partner for the company's double challenge: the switch from Drupal to Shopify and the implementation of the configurator that enables a 3D rendering of customized production. Sabrina explains how Kambukka found us: 'We built up a very good relationship with our new fulfillment partner in a short time. And they told us that we really should have a talk with you. The first conversations with Code were equally pleasant and constructive. Then Covid came into play and we obviously had some doubts for a while: is this the right time to invest? But with almost all stores in lockdown, e-commerce suddenly became more important than ever. Thanks to your clear and efficient communication, it was no problem at all that our collaboration was completely digital.'

Want to read more about migrating to a new e-commerce platform? In this blog, you'll find four reasons for replatforming.

Configuring the configurator

Shopify holds no secrets for us, but the 3D configurator that Kambukka wanted to use to show customized products in real-time in the shop - that was a very different story. Our project manager Marloes Bakker accepted the challenge: 'The configurator was not completely finished when we started developing Kambukka's shops. That's tricky, because the configurator and Shopify are constantly connected to each other. Every change to the configurator had to be processed in the frontend. A lot of time went into that, but we also learned a lot from it.” Sabrina adds: “Shopify hadn't been combined with this configurator before - and it was unchartered waters for Code. Behind the scenes, the configurator takes care of the design and linked files go to the fulfillment party in the correct resolution, and in the meantime they are temporarily on a server.' Sabrina laughs: 'rather complicated, really! But by meeting digitally with all parties, we managed to properly set up this complex process in record time. The end result is a user-friendly editor in which the customer gets a good idea of the possibilities for personalization.'

In addition to implementing the configurator, we started rolling out Shopify for Kambukka in five countries with a multi-store setup. Our expertise and the ease of use of Shopify pleasantly surprised Kambukka, says Sabrina: “We were used to building everything from scratch. Integrating e-mails into Shopify, developing check-out pages, it's all solidly built and very user-friendly – a big relief for us. You can start with a lot of basic apps and gradually expand and continue to mature technically. You showed us well how you can go a lot further with Shopify short-term and long-term. In addition, Shopify is also very intuitive and well designed and that makes it way more pleasant to work with than many other systems.'

Tight deadlines, fast delivery

Kambukka's configurator has only recently gone live, but customers are already very well aware of the personalization options. An example are the drinking cups parents give their children to bring to school. Kambukka is learning a lot from how visitors use the editor, explains Sabrina: “We notice that personalization really catches on: visitors get to work with colors, images and texts. We also see what they encounter in the process and can optimize it considerably with these experiences.'

Kambukka looks back on successful, pleasant and professional cooperation with us. We are appreciated for our clear communication, tight deadlines and fast delivery thanks to bi-weekly sprints, hands-on mentality and thorough professional knowledge. Feedback we're proud of that also underlines how we like to combine new tech and challenges with our deep knowledge of Shopify.

Marloes is particularly impressed by Kambukka's implementation of Shopify. ‘The design is of a really high standard and was applied really well, making the implementation go almost flawlessly. Kambukka was also very quick in placing all their content, which allowed us to keep a high pace. A great project!’