The Customer: The Spirit of Adventure Trust

Spirit of Adventure Trust is a not-for-profit organization running sailing voyages for young New Zealanders. Through the at-sea experience, they aim to give youths resilience, courage, and leadership skills, helping them unlock their potential through a life-changing opportunity. The trust has been offering a mix of standardized trips and custom adventures since 1986, and many of its participants have made life-long friends leaving the program empowered with social and leadership skills for life. 

The Spirit of Adventure website is a crucial sales and marketing piece. It's also a key part of their operations, acting as a passenger portal for onboarding and providing merchandising opportunities.

The Challenge: Meshing eCommerce, content, and resource planning into one easy-to-use solution

The Spirit of Adventure website is a key entry point for many of the young New Zealanders who eventually embark on their adventures. However, the website also acts as a passenger information and onboarding portal, integrating with Zoho as the Trust’s Enterprise Resource Planning tool (ERP).

Their existing website was running on a custom CMS that was outdated and inflexible, causing the team endless problems. The Trust also ran a separate Shopify site for their merchandise.

As a not-for-profit, the Trust needed a flexible, easy-to-use solution that gave them the no-code tools to edit and add to their website in-house without expending unnecessary budget outsourcing site changes to an agency. The solution also had to integrate with Zoho and would ideally move their merchandising operation under the same umbrella while allowing them to sell from any page of their website.

Why Spirit of Adventure chose Octana

eCommerce integration

• Easy integration of Commerce Layer and Contentful through Octana Integrate to create a true headless eCommerce experience.

• Octana helps connect the dots between content, imagery, descriptions, inventory, and the payment gateway, providing a cohesive solution. 

• Easy-to-use tools enable Spirit of Adventure to sell anything they want, anywhere on their site, without developer or designer involvement.

ERP integration

• Octana integrates Zoho with Contentful as the Trust’s ERP to deliver a comprehensive passenger portal and operations management. 

Marketing-friendly tools: 

• Octana allows Spirit of Adventure to easily update and add to their site with a no-code toolkit.

• A more cost-effective initial build than a custom front end and lower long-term total cost of ownership thanks to Octana’s no-code tools reducing the need for developer input or agency support. 

 Octana Integrate played a pivotal role in connecting all the aspects of the Spirit of Adventure site — Zoho, their ERP, Contentful for their imagery and content, and Commerce Layer for their eCommerce requirements and payment gateway. By using Octana as a “head” for these headless platforms, the Spirit of Adventure team now has control over a truly flexible web stack that meets all their requirements.

Successful outcomes

• Since launching, the Spirit of Adventure team has closed their Shopify Store, now selling their merchandise wherever they like within their core site. 

• Successful connections between Commerce Layer and Contentul through Octana combine inventory, imagery, descriptions, and information to present a seamless, secure sales experience.

• Octana’s no-code tools allow the team to control, edit, and build on their technology stack themselves without the ongoing cost of engaging developers. 

• Merchandise sales have increased by 40% year on year.