Damen Shipyards: A smooth sailing digital experience built by Iquality

• Headquarters: Gorinchem, Netherlands
• Technology Stack: Cloudinary, Storyblok, Azure, React.js and Next.js 

Damen Shipyards Group (opens in a new window), a prominent international enterprise owned by the Damen family, conducts business in 120 countries. The global brand has a legacy spanning over a century in shipbuilding, and it operates more than 50 shipyards, repair yards, and affiliated companies. With an annual revenue of over 2 billion euros and 12.500 employees, Damen delivers over 150 vessels annually covering a wide product range, including  tugs, workboats, patrol craft, cargo vessels, dredgers, superyachts and fast ferries.
As part of their effort to provide innovative technological solutions, in collaboration with Iquality, Damen Shipyards migrated from Sitecore and developed a multisite environment with a fully immersive CX and reaching a 75% cost reduction.

Challenges and objectives in reaching a smooth digital experience

Damen, in partnership with Iquality, had a big task ahead of them: streamlining and proofing their digital landscape for the future. In other words, these are the challenges they were facing:

• Creating a platform that is fast, secure, responsive, and cost-efficient, while offering a fully immersive customer experience.
• Establishing a scalable and future-proof platform to accommodate potential growth and changing needs.
• Integrating and consolidating more than 70 websites into a single platform, enabling a multisite environment.
• Designing a portfolio showcasing luxury Amels yachts with fully animated video transitions translated into hundreds of images without compromising page performance and user experience.

Clearing the path with Storyblok

Storyblok was chosen by the IT team at Damen. However, Iquality has already been working with headless CMS systems for two years. In their search for a CMS offering seamless content migration and decoupled digital architecture, they came across Storyblok. The choice to work with Storyblok was easy and here is why:

• The headless and decoupled architecture enabled them to  achieve the right balance of speed, security, and responsiveness.
• The component-based approach enhanced efficiency and reusability.
• The ability to leverage the powerful Storyblok visual editor to optimize the content creation experience and seamlessly switch between test and production environments.
• Storyblok offers  support for both content creators and developers through an API-first approach, enabling easy integration for customers across all channels.
• Reduced costs, complexity, and data footprint by utilizing Storyblok's agile and scalable features.
• Enhanced agility, scalability, and security by employing Storyblok's high standards and ISO27001 certification.
• The possibility to create different experiences for various target groups within the same platform, utilizing the digital landscape effectively.
• Smooth integration with other tech partners, such as Cloudinary, to enrich the platform's capabilities.
• Capability of separating Storyblok spaces for each Damen entity and technical environment, providing tailored solutions for each segment.
• The support of  Damen's omnichannel strategy to engage customers at any stage of their journey, utilizing Storyblok's versatile features.

The main objective for Iquality was to create one platform, combining 70+ websites, that is fast, scalable, secure, responsive and cost efficient. One the platform, Iquality rebuilt the corporate Damen website and the Damen Yachting websites. Iquality’s exceptional approach consists, among others, of offering self-guiding multidisciplinary teams as a service: strategy, concept, design, development and support in one team. The team worked closely with Damen Shipyards, getting to know them and their internal procedures, becoming an extension of their own team.With this set-up and mindset of continuous development, Iquality was more than ready to tackle the complex digital challenges of this project, finding the perfect balance of innovation and control.

Eye on the horizon

In today’s ever-evolving and ever-changing web industry it is paramount to close the digital gap - what experience your digital setup can offer versus what your users need and want. In the case of Damen Shipyards, they were looking to replicate the fast, responsive, and secure platform they built for the Damen corporate website. More than that, they wanted to create a fully immersive digital experience that reflected the luxurious brand of Damen Yachting. With this list of objectives and the initial design, Iquality started implementing their work process, setting up a structured backlog of features and user stories, and forming a practical vision of the final product. The main feature of www.amelsyachting.com (opens in a new window) is, undoubtedly, the portfolio, designed to be the ultimate experience for showcasing their luxury Amels yachts. Fully animated, it emphasizes the lavish vessels through video scrolling, going far beyond a normal brochure you would find on typical websites.

In technical terms, the video animation is translated into hundreds of images being loaded to create the smooth, pixel-perfect transition. The challenge for Iquality was to achieve this goal without affecting page performance and page experience. They overcame this technical challenge by leveraging the power and optimization features of Cloudinary and Storyblok. Additionally, their tech stack also includes Azure, React.js and Next.js 

Working on the portfolio page, displaying two flagships and information about every Amels vessel of the Damen fleet, consumed a big part of the 6 months it took to rebuild the website. When they started the development process, the designs were not complete, but this was not an issue as the headless CMS is ideal for agile project development. The design team worked simultaneously with the development team building reusable components.

Why Storyblok?

Storyblok fully supports the atomic design approach. Our unique multi-layer component-based approach allows content creators to reuse their well-structured content. They can create and nest components without limits, fill them with content, and customize them as needed. Adding to that the powerful Visual Editor, the possibility to work in pages and modules, and the ability to create templates, made it easy for Iquality to intuitively arrange the interface for content creators.

The power of Storyblok’s features and plugins, combined with Iquality’s approach of testing and expanding the limits of what is possible is reflected in the Light house results.

Conclusion

While this project was brought successfully to the finish line, with brilliant results, the journey is not done. Iquality set forth on a long voyage with Damen Shipyards Group, exploring new territories and realizing further ambitions.