How Take It_ used Storyblok to create NGRAVE's futuristic eShop & Academy with eyes on the horizon

Change is inevitable, change will always happen, but you have to apply direction to change, and that's when it's progress. - Doug Baldwin

The same can be said for digitization; as soon as the world started moving towards a more digital construct, it was inevitable that currency would shortly follow. We now live in a world where most people house their money in some digital format or another, whether it’s through their online banking, online payment services, or even digital wallets. NGRAVE, a digital assets security company, has created an industry-leading secure hardware wallets for managing and storing your cryptocurrency. NGRAVE’s products are produced and manufactured right in the heart of Europe, and primarily aimed at people in the European markets with portfolios and experience trading and holding crypto. NGRAVE’s wallets are premium, luxury wallets in their segment with aims to expand into the global markets, namely the Americas and Middle East as well.

Previously, NGRAVE’s website was very basic, put together on a page-builder essentially with no real CMS, with some tools here and there to manage their traffic. However, it was a no man’s land and needed a full revamp, to give NGRAVE the online presence to reflect the premium luxury of their products. The two main issues they were having at the time were the ease of managing their content & information, the other being representing their brand the way they wanted to. Of course there were some smaller issues, namely that as their team grew, it became harder and harder for a wider team to manage their content through a page-builder, as well as the plethora of security issues which are of course a giant problem when you are a cryptocurrency company.

About the Agency

It’s tech, everything is possible. This is the philosophy behind take it_, a design and web development agency from Berlin. They are specialized in creating Storyblok based websites. Their portfolio consists of simple landing pages and complex corporate websites with integrated headless shops that are connected to your favorite marketing and CRM platforms.

In fact, they are very active in the Storyblok users community, organizing, in collaboration with Storyblok, regular developer and marketer meet-ups in Berlin.

The Project

The primary goal for this project was to move to a headless CMS. Rabin, from NGRAVE had previously worked with Take it_ on some other projects involving Prismic, but they’d never heard of Storyblok. When NGRAVE began looking into the CMS options available to them, they were leaning towards Prismic and Contentful due to having prior experience with those platforms and found their price points agreeable. However, Andreas gave NGRAVE a demo of Storyblok from the user experience perspective and NGRAVE felt it really made sense as a solution for their project. While security was an important factor for this implementation, NGRAVE’s CTO went through Storyblok’s security documentation to ensure we live up to the highest security standards. NGRAVE put a big emphasis on the content side of this project, as they had plans to also launch their NGRAVE Academy, their knowledge platform aimed at educating beginners on entering the cryptocurrency world, but also for seasoned traders to keep up to date with the latest news and advancements.

The project needed to integrate with Shopify perfectly as well, as an integral part of the NGRAVE project is their online shop which sells their state-of-the-art crypto wallets. Another important factor in the decision-making of which CMS to choose from was the factor of scalability. NGRAVE knew that they were a part of a growing business, and the future is always a question mark, so they needed to build a platform that had the potential to grow with them as they flourished.

Additionally NGRAVE required the project to be built with multi-lingual, multi-nationality, and overall internationalization. Even though the direction of the company isn’t focused on expanding their internationalization at the current moment, they decided to go with a multi-language strategy to start with so that they have the foundation to build on in the future. Lastly, NGRAVE needed this project to be built with omni-channel in mind. They wanted to ensure that they could update and change their content, mainly their Academy, press pages, and job listings and that those updates would take effect across their digital touch points, whether that is their website, mobile app, or other.

Take it_ & NGRAVE decided to go with Storyblok in the end due to the Visual Editor. While Take it_ were already familiar with Storyblok, NGRAVE were delighted in the ability to live-preview their content before publishing. They immediately saw the benefits of the feature when they imagined scaling their team in the future with some junior developers, and how simple and straightforward onboarding them to Storyblok would be.

Take it_ started with a simple set of different types, such as the landing page, blog page, academy and one or two additional pages. Through their testing in this phase they figured out what was working and would then extend those features or content blocks into the landing page, blog, shop, etc. Being that the products are hosted on Shopify, Take it_ opted to use the Shopify plugin provided by Storyblok for product fetching, as well as using the Shopify SDK on the frontend, with a standard Shopify checkout for processing orders.

One of the challenges around this project was centered around the design. NGRAVE is considered a luxury brand with luxury products, and their online presence is represented in the same way. That means the ‘flow’ of their page needed to have smooth transitions, high quality images displaying their products and their inner workings, etc. Due to this, there were some slight challenges translating the visual aspect of the brand onto the project. However, Take it_ managed to find solutions, such as Scrollytelling to explain how the wallet, app, and graphene work, as well as to exhibit the luxury behind the brand.

While some employees were heavily involved in the workflow with Take it_ and experienced Storyblok first hand, Take it_ and NGRAVE didn’t feel it was necessary to provide custom onboarding sessions. Storyblok was found to be so intuitive that they gave everyone their login details and asked them to spend five minutes playing with the CMS, and they’d all figured it out. They managed very quickly to figure out how to manipulate the CMS and use its features to create new bloks, content types, pages, etc.

The Future

Being that this project was built with internationalization in mind, the next steps in the future are to expand their supported languages and support countries. NGRAVE are also ambitious about where they want to take the project. They’d like to use Storyblok as one centralized backend to manage all their content, and push it out to their website, mobile app, and maybe even to the Metaverse, which is something NGRAVE are looking into as well in their multi-platform exploration.