eCommerceHow Functional Nutrition achieved their vision for the future with Storyblok

Headquarters: Sheffield, United Kingdom
Technology stack: Shopify, React, Next.js, Vercel

Functional Nutrition, founded in 2007 by David Brassey, aims to help people live healthier and longer lives using natural healing methods. However, the pandemic and Brexit affected their business, as their clients faced higher costs and shipping difficulties. Therefore, Functional Nutrition relocated to the Netherlands and decided to upgrade their B2C platform, Supplement Hub, to offer more payment options, flexibility, and multilingual availability.

With the help of Storyblok, Story of AMS, an award-winning digital agency specializing in eCommerce, created a new system tailored to fit and adapt to the technological needs of Functional Nutritions. Storyblok was the perfect solution for the company to recreate their storefront with the payment options they wanted, the multilingual features they were after, and the flexibility to update and change the content at a moment's notice. The platform restructuring was a great success, scoring high in various web development metrics: 92% in best practices, a remarkable 85% in page accessibility, and a high 92% score on the SEO ratio.

Challenges in Functional Nutrition’s B2C platform rebranding

Functional Nutrition began as Amrita Nutrition, a platform for professionals, practitioners, and their clients. However, they noticed that there was a lot of interest from consumers, so they launched Supplement Hub as their B2C solution to encourage consumers to buy their products. It launched as a copy of their current platform with a Shopify template and Shopify Plus.

• Functional Nutrition was uncertain about continuing with Shopify or exploring other options like Magento - they were looking for their core tool to extend their eCommerce functionalities.
  
• ​​Having previous experiences with custom-built and off-the-shelf CMSs, Functional Nutrition sought an intuitive, flexible, and composable solution to enable them to proceed freely with their projects' requirements.
  
• The company’s platform could not implement local payments, multiple currencies, or multi-lingual features, holding them back from planned international expansion.

How Storyblok contributed to the B2C eCommerce expansion

• Story of AMS recommended a modern tech stack while still incorporating Shopify as the main tool as Functional Nutrition requested.
• Using Storyblok, Story of AMS created a system tailored to fit and adapt to the technological needs of Functional Nutritions’ developers and the flexibility of managing content for marketers. The agency implemented Next.js and React as a frontend, securely hosting all the data on Vercel.
• Thanks to Storyblok’s extensive API functionalities, it was possible to recreate the company’s storefront with the payment and currency options they wanted and implement needed multiple language features.
• Functional Nutrition’s team enjoyed Storyblok’s Visual Editor and its functionality. Its live preview and drag and drop function gave them complete control over content creation workflows and UX building process.
• The company was very satisfied with Storyblok’s easy-to-use and intuitive nature. They only needed some brief guidance from Story of AMS regarding how to use Storyblok, whether it was how to add images to their products, or populate their store with products, or even work on the translations. The ease with which their people learned to use Storyblok proved that their initial fears and hesitations weren’t obstacles at all.

Functional Nutrition’s journey towards their vision with Storyblok

Story of AMS worked iteratively and agilely to rebrand Functional Nutrition's B2C platform, Supplement Hub. They designed the UX based on the client's feedback and used Figma to show the UI layer. They also introduced Slack as the primary communication tool, which required some learning from the client. After the design approval, they developed and tested the platform with the client.

When Functional Nutrition handed the reins to Story of AMS back in August 2021, they committed to a launch in the first week of December of the same year. Everyone knows how difficult it is to stick to firm deadlines when it comes to projects like this, and not only did Supplement Hub go live in the first week of December 2021, but they’ve already worked on adding multiple languages and payment methods. They’ve also managed to launch their UK version of Supplement Hub which will serve as the main hub for their clients in the United Kingdom, while the main Supplement Hub storefront will service clients globally.

Together we shape the future of natural health

Integrating Functional Nutrition's main landing page with its eCommerce layer was an exciting challenge, which required identifying the main pain points of the platform, developing the ideal digital strategy, and implementing a perfect and future-proof technology solution. When launching the company's B2B webshop, Story of AMS set a goal to choose the best future-proof solution to ensure the entire integrated platform's flexibility, reliability, and performance. Storyblok enabled Functional Nutrition to have a perfectly integrated storefront with their desired payment options, multilingual features, and content flexibility. Overall, it was the ideal solution partner for both the developers and the marketers of Functional Nutrition, who are now ready to revolutionize the world of natural health further.