Case Study
Teton Ridge+
Contents
The Client
A Thriving Lifestyle Brand Looking to Deliver Online Experiences to a New Generation of Western Sports Fans and Athletes.
Teton Ridge, already established as a fast-growing player in the Western Sports and Lifestyle industry, had a vision to create a new business line focused on bringing together fans and athletes who share a passion for Western Sports.
The Teton Ridge team recognized the need for a new digital home base to enable experiences for a generation that is spending increasingly more time online. At the same time, these experiences must cater to the unique needs of a tight-knit and multi-generational community of Western Sports enthusiasts.
The Challenge
Connecting online engagement with offline events.
Recognizing that a new generation of Western Sports fans have different expectations compared to their parents, Teton Ridge hypothesized that a comprehensive digital experience, allowing fans to stay connected with their favorite athletes and events in the Western Sports industry, would provide a unique and stand-out experience for this younger audience.
Melding the best offline experiences, like The American Rodeo, with a best-in-class digital experience became a top priority for Teton Ridge. Creating that connection between online engagement and offline events proved to be a viable challenge that Teton Ridge approached Apollo 21 to aid in solving.
The Plan
Ideate and incubate an experience that brings Western Sports fans and athletes together.
To deliver on this ambitious goal, Teton Ridge initially envisioned multiple apps: one for fans and another for athletes. With this knowledge in hand, the Apollo 21 team guided Teton Ridge through our Incubate process involving in-depth research with both fans and athletes through the Lean Customer Development process. Countless interviews, ideas, and prototypes were created along the journey to bring the experience to fruition.
One of our key discoveries during our user and athlete interviews led to the key decision of bringing fans and athletes together under a single experience: distinguishing between a "fan" and an "athlete" in the Western Sports space can be challenging. An athlete who participates in a local Team Roping event could also be a fan attending The American Rodeo. Based on this insight, the Apollo 21 team advised Teton Ridge to develop a single application that caters to both groups.
The Solution
A flagship brand experience & mobile-first web app built to scale with Teton Ridge.
As with all of our venture-driven growth efforts, the Apollo 21 team conducted in-depth market research to discover best-in-class digital fan experiences across other sports.
This process was then followed by numerous Customer Development interviews with both athletes and fans to understand and differentiate the key needs, functionality, and features that would benefit each audience on the Teton Ridge+ platform.
Given the target market and our learnings throughout the Customer Development process, the product team chose to prioritize a mobile-first web approach instead of developing a native application. This decision allowed engineers to build and iterate rapidly while catering to an audience that tends toward slow adoption of new technologies.
This fast, iterative approach enabled Apollo 21 to develop the core feature set for Teton Ridge+ in half the anticipated timeline, including the integration of Teton Ridge+ with Apollo 21’s proprietary Mission Control platform, Shopify, and a variety of other services to create a complete app-like experience on a website.
The Outcomes
The launch of Teton Ridge+ at the 2022 National Finals Rodeo (NFR) was a significant milestone for Teton Ridge and an immediate hit with fans and athletes alike. The platform introduced features that were notably absent from the world of Western Sports, enabling a dynamic relationship among fans, events, and athletes. New user registration continues to grow as more fans embrace the platform to discover, follow, and livestream events via Teton Ridge+.
Athletes are also signing up at a rapid pace thanks to new features developed by Apollo 21 specifically for this audience including the ability to find and share videos and photos from recent competitions and enabling the sharing of detailed athlete profiles that foster deeper connectivity with the Western Sports fanbase.
In Their Own Words
“The team at Apollo 21 communicates clearly and stays focused on outcomes, not activity. I would not hesitate to recommend them to any organization — not just for help launching a digital product, but assuring guidance and creativity along the way.”
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