A gear shop that reads like the shop floor
Two stores, deep staff expertise, and a website that gave none of it away. We rebuilt around the advice people came for.
- Client
- Nordic Peak Outfitters
- Sector
- Outdoor retail
- Service
- Website
Nordic Peak Outfitters
01 · Overview
Nordic Peak has sold backcountry and nordic ski equipment for nineteen years across two locations. Their competitive advantage is staff who will spend forty minutes fitting a boot properly. Their website listed products in a grid with a paragraph of manufacturer copy underneath.
People were researching online, then buying from national retailers who were cheaper on price and identical on information. The gap in the market was the advice, and none of it was published.
02 · Goals
- 01Get staff expertise onto the site without adding hours to anyone's week
- 02Support the boot and ski fitting appointment, which is where sales are won
- 03Make the Canmore and Calgary locations distinct rather than interchangeable
- 04Build something the retail team can maintain during a nine-week peak season
03 · What we did
- 01
Recorded the advice instead of writing it
We recorded staff answering the fitting questions they get daily, then edited those transcripts into guides. Nobody on the retail team had to sit down and write anything.
- 02
Made fitting appointments the primary action
The site sells the appointment, not the boot. Booking a fitting is the main call to action on every product family page, and it carries the store location through to the confirmation.
- 03
Gave each location its own personality
Canmore serves visiting skiers with different needs than the Calgary store's season-ticket regulars. Each location page has its own staff, hours, stock focus and trail conditions note.
- 04
Designed for gloves and cold hands
Tap targets, contrast and font sizes were set for someone checking conditions on a phone in a trailhead parking lot, which is when a lot of the traffic actually arrives.
04 · Deliverables
- Custom retail website across two locations with distinct location pages
- Twelve staff-authored fitting and gear-selection guides
- Fitting appointment booking flow with location routing
- Seasonal trail and conditions module updated by store staff
- Structured data for both storefronts and local search setup
- Two half-day training sessions for retail staff
05 · Results
The guides did the work. Nordic Peak now ranks for the fitting questions people were previously asking national retailers, and the retail team has published seven more guides than we originally built, entirely on their own.
- Fitting appointments
- +214%
- Booked appointments across both locations, first full season after launch.
- Average time on guides
- 4:41
- Median engaged time on the staff-authored gear guides.
- Organic search traffic
- +37%
- Year over year, driven almost entirely by the guide content.
- Guides published by staff
- 19
- Added by the retail team themselves in the twelve months since launch.
We will walk you through this project in full, including the parts that did not work first time.
Book a session and we will take you through the Nordic Peak Outfitters build properly: the decisions, the trade-offs and what we would do differently. Then we will tell you honestly whether the same approach fits your business.
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Every one of these began with one honest conversation.
Tell us what is happening in your business right now. We will tell you whether we can help, what it would cost and how long it would take, in writing, before you commit to anything.
- Emailhello@harwoodmedia.ca
- Phone(403) 555-0182
- Response timeEvery enquiry answered by the next business day.
