eCommerce How Functional Nutrition achieved their vision for the future with Storyblok

While the whole world was struggling through the chaos of the pandemic, the United Kingdom was going through similar issues with the added chaos of Brexit. What many had once considered to be an impossibility was now a living reality. Many organizations and companies had to consider whether to relocate their businesses or stay within the UK borders and adhere to the new policies and regulations. For some, it was an easy decision, while for others there were a lot of considerations that needed to be thought through and processed. Functional Nutrition, with their consumer platform Supplement Hub, an eCommerce storefront selling healthy supplements, had to consider whether to stay within the UK or to make some changes.

Founded in 2007 by David Brassey, Functional Nutrition’s vision for the future is to see people live healthier, longer, more enriched lives by taking greater responsibility for their own health and wellness by using natural healing methods. However when Brexit came into effect, their clients started looking elsewhere for products because products were getting more expensive due to additional costs, VAT, and the additional difficulties with shipping products to customers. After some consideration, Functional Nutrition decided to relocate to the Netherlands and to update their B2C platform, Supplement Hub, as it was lacking payment options, flexibility, multi-lingual availability, etc. They sought out several agencies to manage the redevelopment of Supplement Hub, and decided to hand the reins to Story of AMS.

Story of AMS is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in the field of eCommerce and helps brands with strategy, design, development, and (video) content production, founded in 2016. At the moment, the team counts 30+ talents and works for clients like Signify, Intersport, Nestlé, Lucas Bols & Nike.

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 offer consumers to buy their products. It launched as a copy of their current platform with a Shopify template and Shopify Plus. The platform was very limited, incapable of implementing local payments, multiple currencies, or multi-lingual features. Functional Nutrition weren’t even sure they wanted to continue with Shopify, or look into alternatives such as Magento, however they decided to keep Shopify as the main central tool and build around it.

The Project

Story of AMS recommended a very modern tech stack while still incorporating Shopify as the main tool as Functional Nutrition requested.

• Javascript Framework: React

• Web Framework: Next.js

• Headless CMS: Storyblok

• CDN: Vercel

While Story of AMS had originally looked into several CMS options, they chose Storyblok based on the Visual Editor and the functionality it provides. While they explained Storyblok’s ease-to-use and intuitive nature, Functional Nutrition was weary though due to previous experiences with both custom built and off-the-shelf CMS solutions. However, as the project progressed and with new hires joining the company, Functional Nutrition found that the solution was quite intuitive. 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.

Story of AMS uses iterative working methods to ensure things are completed step-by-step, but in an agile way. They started out by tackling the digital rebranding based on the brand name, Supplement Hub. They presented some choices to Function Nutrition and based on their answers, Story of AMS started building out the UX. One of the small challenges was that almost no-one at Functional Nutrition had used Slack before, which was the main communication tool between them and the agency. There was a small learning curve for all the new tools introduced, but none posed too big a challenge to be overcome. Once the UX was approved, they added the UI layer on top of it, all created inside Figma so all the stakeholders could see the progress and changes with full transparency. Once all the design work was approved, Story of AMS began the development phase for the project, followed by a testing phase with Functional Nutrition, to ensure that all the processes were functioning as intended.

When Functional Nutrition handed the reins to Story of AMS back in August, they committed to a launch in the first week of December. 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, 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.

Key Takeaways

At Storyblok, we have always strived in creating the best headless experience possible, made for both developers and marketers. In that, we created a system tailored to fit and adapt to the technological needs of developers, and the flexibility of managing content for marketers. This is why it was the perfect solution for Functional Nutrition 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.

Functional Nutrition’s vision for the future is to see people live healthier, longer, more enriched lives by taking greater responsibility for their own health and wellness by using natural healing methods, and with Storyblok, we can help them achieve that goal by providing them with the CMS and platform where they can represent themselves best.