A Modern Legend
Airstream Supply Company
A flexible storytelling & sales engine for a legacy adventure brand
Background
An American icon, Airstream has been fueling America’s appetite for adventure for nearly a century. In recent years, a younger generation of travelers has been drawn to the allure of the open road—falling in love with everything the brand stands for. An Airstream is more than a modern design masterpiece. It’s a symbol of freedom, exploration and bohemian living. There’s a reason it’s part of MoMA’s permanent collection and a staple on top Instagram feeds: it’s timeless.
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Featured Services
Business Analysis
Product Concept & Inception
Product Management
Product Planning
Service & Operations
UX/UI Design
Visual Design
Web, Mobile & Platform Development
Opportunity
Airstreams are built to last. They’re premium machines and priced to match. But because they are such an investment, the brand takes a long view, building relationships with eventual customers that span decades. To create these meaningful connections, we needed to engage a new generation of travelers and give them a taste of the wanderlust-driven lifestyle Airstream is known for.
Approach
We used storytelling to conquer a new frontier in the digital world. By sharing the real-life legends behind the Airstream brand, we knew we could capture the attention of aspiring Airstream owners and outdoor enthusiasts—showing them a world of possibilities for their next adventure.
We built an experience that invited people into the brand’s authentic narrative, inspiring them to hit the road and showing them high-quality gear with the same nostalgic appeal as the silver bullets themselves. At the time we started, the Gutenburg editor experience was still a plugin, so we were early adopters, adapting quickly to establish this new retail extension.
Leaning into the next era of web tech, we created a semi-headless site that used server-side React with GraphQL and Redis to tap into the WordPress REST API. It may sound like a mouthful, but it’s a blazing fast architecture that blends real-time product data with smart caching and reusable components to create a site that feels like an app and works anywhere—even on the road.
The final website experience interwove editorial-style content with specially curated Airstream products. Instead of feeling like a commercial shopping experience, the items became part of the landscape, acting as characters in the story and inviting passive interaction as visitors scrolled.
To support the website experience, we also created a real-time hybrid purchasing platform that combined in-house stock products with dropship items, transforming the inventory management process and seamlessly getting these handcrafted products to customers.
“They’ve created a platform that’s easy to use. It works really well and it’s beautiful. The ease of use is amazing; they’ve created something that’s more than a site. It’s a platform with longevity, beautiful and user-friendly.”
Jay Cullis
Content Manager, Airstream
Results
In the end, we created a solution that was consistent with the Airstream ethos: premium, high-quality and built to last.
At the time of launch in 2019, Airstream Supply Company was the most advanced WooCommerce enterprise site out there, receiving high praise at the WordCamp for Publishers conference the same year. Check out our product demo highlighting the power of WordPress Gutenberg and Block Editor features, originally presented at the ContentTECH Summit conference.
Its success is also featured on the WooCommerce main page.