Our client New Swarm Sports, LLC is responsible for inventing a new sport for golf courses called FlingGolf. It’s a disruption of a long tradition, akin to the time when snowboarding first hit the slopes of traditional downhill skiing territory. Using what resembles a lacrosse stick with a customized head, a player cradles the golf ball before hurling it down the fairway towards the green. The player only needs one stick for all game play as the FlingStick can be used to fling as well as putt the ball.
Although a burgeoning sport, the company estimates that FlingGolf has been played on thousands of courses across the United States, Canada, in several European countries, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.
Campaign Objectives: A Better User Experience and Branding
With momentum and awareness building around FlingGolf and the company’s commitment to scaling the sport, New Swarm Sports tapped Primary for a redesign of FlingGolf.com.
Before working with Primary, the FlingGolf.com site was built over the last few years, with content and functionality added over time. The site needed a new, streamlined user experience and interface that would drive sales of FlingSticks utilizing the Shopify platform.
FlingGolf also wanted to provide shopping tools that would enable greater customization, in response to consumers’ desire for personalized FlingSticks with branding from the NHL, NCAA, Military and more.
Our other goal was to redesign the site with our new brand look and feel to attract, educate and engage players and course owners to FlingGolf as well as launch an Ambassador program and build an online community.
Challenge: Quickly Outgrowing an Older Site
Before we started work, our audit revealed that the existing site had a lot of redundant, superfluous or hard-to-find content. Additionally, the site’s design did not reflect the company’s desired professional look for the brand and sport of FlingGolf.
As the vision for the company and the brand has grown, the site did not intuitively serve the various types of users and was missing key functionality New Swarm Sports need to scale and grow the sport. Beyond the technical challenge of building the site in 6-8 weeks, there was the challenge of branding a new sport, and there was the need to tell a compelling story.
Solution: Melding Form and Function
We were tasked with extending a Shopify template to accommodate custom assets, components and plugins that go beyond a strictly e-commerce function to which most Shopify sites are confined.
These components include an event calendar, build-a-stick and course finder functionality — all designed to facilitate a better experience for visitors to turn them into fans and players.
The Primary team were provided with very simple brand guidelines, and tasked with bringing the brand to life for the first time. Our branding work can be seen in the balancing of the color palette, image treatment, graphic elements etc.
Result: Fling On the Upswing
We launched the new site in time for the company’s major trade show season to enable course activation and sales. And we’re seeing a lower bounce rate, higher session duration, and more pages per session. But the best news is that our client is pleased with the results.
We were thrilled to work with the talented team at Primary,” said John Pruellage, President of New Swarm Sports. “They were great collaborators and problem solvers throughout the process as we explored different ways to shape the user experience for our consumers and golf course management customers. The team was agile and flexible, which allowed us to successfully launch the new site on a very accelerated timeline. We consider them valuable partners in our ongoing journey to grow the sport of FlingGolf.”
