Woodapple: Case Study | Windlass Steelcrafts Brands

Windlass Steelcrafts is the largest sword maker in the world. The company is spread across every part of the world and works with governments on six continents. They are also known to partner with artists, design studios, and companies to bring to life iconic pieces for popular movies, such as Game of Thrones, Gladiator, Harry Potter, Kingdom of Heaven, Pirates of Caribbean, A Knight’s Tale.

Learn more about the project

Woodapple works closely with Windlass to create a marketing strategy that aims towards a sustained effort to increase the online visibility of each of the brands and thus increasing their online retail business both organically as well as through paid ads. This association has snowballed into a full-fledged creative and technology consultancy for information dissemination and communication through website, emailers, social media, affiliate marketing, digital catalogues and more.

The main challenge for the team of marketers and content creators were to come up with a marketing strategy, as well as art direction and messaging that gives each of brands a distinct individuality, yet still, feel like part of the Windlass brand universe.

WORK /

Windlass, Atlanta Cutlery & Museum Replicas - Design, Technology & Marketing

Apart from the brand identity, Windlass was looking forward to technologically upgrade their online presence to provide a great user experience to their customers. As a result, fully-responsive eCommerce websites was subsequently launched for their sub-brands- Windlass Steelcrafts, Museum Replicas, Atlanta Cutlery, and Windlass Sword Company. The crucial element of this task was to migrate the existing websites to a new platform and integrate with their response server while keeping up the revenue and conversions of the business. As a result of this migration from AspDotNetStorefront (for Museum Replicas and Atlanta Cutlery) and Magento (for Windlass Sword Company) to nopCommerce, the uptime of the sites shot up drastically to 99.99%.

The new sites have features like-

Product upsell- Now the sites can sell more than 10 Products on a single product page and create a virtual product bundle of Cross-sell, related & recommended items. Visitors can also see products purchased by other customers. These facilities were not available in the previous system.

Better Product Listing- The pages were designed in such a way that the visitor can easily select the desired attribute such as personalization, custom engraving, and sharpening and place an order. However, earlier duplicate SKUs were created to handle these services, which made the database inappropriate and inventory unmanageable.

Apart from this, clear demarcation of product inventory status was introduced like ‘In-stock,’ ‘Closeout,’ ‘Discounted,’ ‘Sold out.’ These labels help the customers know in advance whether a product is available or is back-ordered, thus leading to a reduction in the number of order cancelations.

GDPR compliance- In view of GDPR, we worked closely with Windlass team to make each site fully compliant by updating input forms, privacy policy, and list of subscribers.

Loyalty program launched- An Online reward program was introduced each for Atlanta Cutlery and Museum Replicas to encourage repeat sales from customers and increase their lifetime value.

For a user-friendly experience, the ‘My Account’ section on the website has the feature where all the registered customers can view their ‘Reward Points’ balance and redeem them accordingly. We also send out monthly Reward Points emailers to all eligible customers to keep them in the loop of their Reward Points account balance.

To better promote the reward system, we give opportunities to earn more Reward Points on registration and sharing reviews. As a result, there is an increase in registrations and reviews on both websites. This strategy resulted in increased registration for MRL by approx 77% and for ACC by approx 57% just within a few months of implementation.

Better Plugin Integrations and Reporting- Important plugins like Google Shopping plugin and Amazon Sync plugin were installed in the website to auto-sync products’ price and inventory in Google Shopping Ads and Amazon listing respectively. Automation of these processes leads to saving time, effort, and zero errors.

Further, quite a few of the reports were previously inaccessible or had to be generated by the Tech team, on request, but the websites now have better user interactive admin area and dashboard with numerous reports. Also, in the previous system, there were a few glitches in order status updates, so they had to be marked manually, or not at all. But, the sites now have proper order status along with their delivery dates. This crucial step has a profound impact on other advanced facilities like Reward Points and Product Reviews.

We also helped Windlass integrate the nopMobile app by Seurata to their sites, Museum Replicas, and Atlanta Cutlery, which helps the team of marketers and stakeholders, manage both the sites on-the-go. With real-time notifications and analytics, this has been the most useful tool.

The combined efforts of new features in websites and marketing activities considerably increased the revenue, especially during sale events such as Annual and Black Friday sale.

Additionally, our team also helped Windlass help create a sub-brand, Costumes and Collectibles, offering high-quality costume and other collectible items encompassing medieval, Renaissance, Greek, Celtic, pirates and steampunk themes. Every aspect of the brand, right from the logo, to the website to the subsequent promotion, was designed to set the brand apart from its sister companies, yet give it a feel of Windlass brand as a whole.

ALL PROJECTS >>