CUSTOMER STORY
How Black Rifle’s lean developer team saved
160 hours per sprint
Black Rifle increased its Lighthouse score by 37 points, made significant strides with SEO, and decreased time spent on new page builds.
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Black Rifle Coffee Company adopted Builder and saw
160
hours saved per sprint
37
point improvement in Lighthouse score
40
hours saved per sprint on mobile development
40%
faster time to conversion
Industry
Coffee
Integrations
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
About Black Rifle Coffee Company
Black Rifle Coffee Company was founded by former U.S. Army Green Beret Evan Hafer to serve coffee and culture to people who love America. They import, blend, and roast high-quality beans, and ship them directly to consumers. Black Rifle credits its success to a growing workforce of over 10,000 veterans committed to helping other service members transition from the military to entrepreneurship
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Our developer team is ecstatic about working with Builder. They’re far and away the best vendor that we work with in terms of customer service, development processes, and documentation.
— Colin Tracy, Director of Engineering at Black Rifle Coffee Company
Challenge
Black Rifle Coffee Company needed to implement digital storefront changes across four brands
Black Rifle Coffee Company and its four subsidiary brands needed a better way to manage content for its four separate digital storefronts. As the coffee company geared up to migrate from Shopify to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), Colin Tracy, Black Rifle’s Director of Engineering, knew it was also time for a new CMS. And his team didn’t have much time to make the switch since its Shopify contract was up in less than a month.
So Colin hoped to onboard a new CMS in parallel with their transition to SFCC. He wanted a CMS that could help his storefront team manage all of Black Rifle’s subsidiary properties, eliminate disparate systems, and consolidate work for his compact team of full-stack developers. His wish list included:
- User-friendly tools: Black Rifle’s storefront team didn’t have the technological know-how for custom builds. So a drag-and-drop visual interface was a must.
- Shorter development cycles: The developer lifecycle for new content was two to three weeks, not including changes to Black Rifle’s other properties and mobile app.
- Streamlined systems and testing: Colin initially tried out Bright Spot, which would cover some instances, but its outdated Model-View-Controller framework made development and testing unwieldy.
When he found Builder, the cutting-edge visual CMS was the obvious choice. Colin also saw the opportunity to streamline the customer user journey with Builder’s conversion tracking API and heatmaps.
We only have a few full-stack developers, so I wanted a CMS that could integrate all of our disparate systems into one place.
Solution
Builder simplifies developer builds and content management
Switching to Builder saved Black Rifle’s developer, storefront, and marketing teams significant amounts of time. To begin with, Colin’s team migrated more than 5,700 articles to Builder in just 27 days, easily making their deadline. From there, Black Rifle’s developers only took a week to set up their documentation and get to work.
Shipping new pages, experiments, and campaigns is now “self-serve” with Builder’s drag-and-drop visual editor, which has empowered the storefront team to work autonomously. Builder’s Visual CMS connects to Black Rifle’s React component library so their storefront and marketing teams can drag and drop content blocks at will. It’s also incredibly easy to use these components across their subsidiaries and mobile app, making content creation across channels and their four brands seamless.
What’s more, developers can spend every sprint cycle laser-focused on their own builds.
All of this prompted the Black Rifle team to expand their use of the tool into more use cases, including:
- Shipping new PDPs with products in SFCC. With Builder, visualizing PDPs for the storefront team and launching products on SFCC is a snap. The storefront team views the page in Builder and uses section templates to make changes. They can also push out changes to the mobile app without initiating an entirely separate build. Meanwhile, devs don’t need to stand by to assist.
- Using dynamic pages and A/B testing content for specialty products. Because Builder integrates with SFCC, the storefront team can see exactly what page variants will look like before they make them live. Using Builder’s Visual Editor, marketers can easily make changes and A/B test their content without developer assistance.
- Optimizing the subscription flow. Implementing Builder’s conversion tracking API for stats and heat mapping subverted some of Black Rifle’s assumptions about what their customers want. For example, they deployed event tracking for their coffee club signup flow and discovered that no one was clicking on several steps that they thought were important. Eliminating these steps led to an increase in profit margins.
With Builder, it’s so easy to migrate data; the latency is extremely low, there’s no real rate limiting, and the caching is incredible. We’re using it wherever we can.
Results
Black Rifle’s developers saved 160 hours per sprint with Builder’s easy page builds
Now that the storefront team builds pages autonomously, each lean team can focus on its core competencies. This streamlines daily content management, leaving time for developers to focus on new projects where their expertise can shine through. This workflow improvement has yielded the following changes:
160
hours saved per sprint
37
point improvement in Lighthouse score
40
hours saved per sprint on mobile development
40%
faster time to conversion
Ultimately, Builder’s cost-impact ratio for Black Rifle is very high. For instance, implementing Builder’s tracking API helped Black Rifle increase margins by 1 to 2%. Colin looks forward to continuing to use the Visual CMS to streamline the coffee company’s processes in terms of developer builds and increasing on-site conversions.
Using Builder has freed up our storefront team significantly. When they build a page, they don’t have to ask developers for help.
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How Black Rifle’s lean developer team saved 160 hours per sprint
