Boosted Boards

Creating a robust and scalable website management experience using Shopify and Contentful.

The Beginning

What began as a few grad students looking for a better way to get around campus, has since grown to become a globally recognized brand on a mission to reinvent transportation. Boosted empowers people everywhere to move across their cities, campuses, and communities in ways that are fun, fast, and simple.

What we came to discover was that Boosted’s website was a bit disorganized, making both the backend experience and user journey somewhat clunky. Shopify and an old Wordpress theme were butting heads, and it was time to streamline the process. Our plan of attack was to supply Boosted with the tools they needed to easily create and update content, while keeping the process simple.

The Plan

Given how Shopify had just made their Graphql API endpoint available, we decided to retain Boosted’s current Shopify setup and get rid of everything else that was weighing the website down, or overcomplicating actions that should be simple. We decided to go with Contentful for their CMS, as they too provided a Graphql endpoint for querying content. The combination of both Shopify and Contentful making Graphql available was essential to building a robust and scalable website.

One of their main pain points was the ease of creating new pages. Initially, we made three templates where a user could create content and publish to a test environment (beta). Once the designs were reviewed, they could then post those changes to the production site at the push of a button. This gave them control over their content without constant intervention from developers.

Not long after Boosted’s new product launch for their Boosted Minis, [Casey Neistat](https://www.youtube.com/user/caseyneistat), a popular youtuber, retweeted the launch tweet that Boosted put out. The noise Neistat made for Boosted sent a drove of his followers to the servers and temporarily crashed the Boosted website. We dove in and quickly added server power so that customers were able to purchase the new boards once again.

The Scooter

A few months back, Boosted approached us with a new product page idea for their Boosted Scooter launch. Kyson and Hayden, from Boosted, wanted to radically change how people interacted with their products prior to purchase. Over the course of three weeks, we worked directly with the Boosted team to implement the new designs. A few days before launch, we sent our dev team out to work side-by-side with the Boosted marketing and design teams. For three days, it was crunch time, which resulted in a rewarding and successful launch with the new Boosted Scooter.