The Bigger Boat - You can never stand still

The Bigger Boat started their “maiden voyage” in 2010 with a crew of three people. Since then they have grown into an award-winning crew of strategists, storytellers, brand gurus and digital thought leaders with a focus akin to captain Ahab: to make their clients successful.
On their journey, as their team grew and their cumulative skill set expanded, their values remained the same. As an integrated marketing agency they are focused on continual improvement, being respectful to each other and enjoying what they do. They approach client relationships with full trust and immerse themselves in the projects, essentially becoming an extension of the clients’ team.

What is special about The Bigger Boat

As any other agency, The Bigger Boat is looking to deliver the best results for their clients. Actually, The Bigger Boat takes it a step further and makes sure that their clients are not only happy about the end result but also about the process that gets them there.
Each project gets their undivided attention and their best effort towards success and, as an added benefit, they build long-term relationships with their clients, as they provide a consistent experience across every brand touchpoint.
Taking an ambidextrous approach, the agency recognizes the importance of embracing new technologies. True to their value of being curious, The Bigger Boat channels effort and time to find new and better ways of delivering projects, not shying away from new techniques or technology. In a nutshell, the agency is on a constant path of improvement, they never stand still.

Way of working

In their endeavor in listening to their clients, The Bigger Boat easily recognizes trends that actually change the way of working. The interest and knowledge of headless outside of the development bubble has significantly increased. They noted that more and more clients have started asking for headless solutions rather than them having to “sell” the idea to their clients.
As such, at the start of the pandemic, they were looking for headless options to move away from the continual patch-and-fix cycle that comes with WordPress websites.
They first settled on Prismic, but weren’t completely satisfied with its features in terms of UX and admin area. The team had concerns that, if they had difficulties to use it, their clients would also struggle to use the platform.
True to form, The Bigger Boat didn’t stand still, they continued their research.

Journey to Storyblok

In their research, the agency came across Storyblok and were instantly intrigued from a features and benefits point of view. It fit their internal workflow, focused on a component-based approach, and it quickly became a key part of their process. The first progress was noticed in development speed, quality and consistency. The “atomic design”, innate to Storyblok, has been implemented across the whole business which has helped them unify their design and development process.
More than that, The Bigger Boat quickly realized that, opposed to other systems that are weighted towards the developer, Storyblok is more focused towards the needs of the business or marketer.

Changes and solutions

From a development and performance standpoint, moving away from monolithic solutions was the best decision, but they still needed a CMS that account managers and clients would find as easy to use.

Once they started using Storyblok, the agency saw changes in the training and support for clients. Onboarding them became much easier and efficient, as their clients found Storyblok to be very intuitive to use. In fact, they realized that their clients prefer it over their monolithic solution.

At the same time, they are very content with how the component-driven design and dev complemented and validated their own process. Their development workflow has transformed significantly, for the better. They gained more confidence in planning their projects, splitting it in chunks and writing code.
The way story data is bundled together provides them with an extremely dynamic way to fetch any new data or schema using the front-end framework of your choice.

Case Study: ANDYSMANCLUB

ANDYSMANCLUB is a men’s suicide prevention charity, offering free-to-attend peer-to-peer support groups across the United Kingdom and online. The charity needed a website that was reliable and simple to use and the main objective was to make it as easy as possible for the end user to find a group they could attend. The organization also wanted the option to show multiple groups within a radius so the end user could see which locations were available in that area.

ANDYSMANCLUB has found that some attendees would rather travel further afield to attend a group so there’s less of a chance of bumping into anybody they know. This functionality was imperative and could potentially help save lives. ANDYSMANCLUB is the nominated charity of the year for The Bigger Boat. The Bigger Boat can’t stand still, whether it's about embracing new technologies or supporting projects like the ANDYSMANCLUB website build. Their values are true today as they were 12 years ago, and giving back to the community is a big part of that.

Partner of the Month

A drive for excellence and creativity that turns heads. Award-winning campaigns. Getting clients and their brands front and centre of their industry. That’s what The Bigger Boat is about.
As a full-service creative agency The Bigger Boat can help you with every aspect of your marketing and communications, from website design and development to search, content and social media marketing.
We are happy and proud to announce that they are the July Storyblok Partner of the Month!
You can get in touch with them by visiting their website or writing them an email. You can also find them on our partners list.