CASE STUDY: KCEC | Kabul Carpet Export Center

SUMMARY

Kabul Carpet Export Center (KCEC) celebrates the beauty, history, and tradition of authentic, unparalleled Afghan rugs. They are passionate about reviving the carpet-weaving industry, to enable it to become an integral part of the Afghan economy and help bring stability to the country by generating jobs for the skilled weavers and craftspeople of Afghanistan.

Their Afghan rugs were previously only available to the trade. But with their launch of a domestic warehouse to sell Afghan rugs directly to consumers across the world, they needed the appropriate internet marketing presence to do so.

CRANK Digital Marketing Authority designed an entirely new, consumer-facing website for KCEC with e-commerce capabilities while reviving their blog and increasing SEO to drive additional awareness and sales.

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OUR GOAL

To create a new consumer-facing website that is responsive, user-friendly, and beautiful while strategically integrating adaptable e-commerce solutions.

SERVICES PROVIDED

Magento Website Development
eCommerce
Web Design
SEO
Image Processing
Hosting & Security
eCommerce Shop Maintenance

Logo.

Challenge

Kabul Carpet Export Center is made possible by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is the world’s premier international development agency. USAID’s work advances U.S. national security and economic prosperity, demonstrates American generosity, and promotes a path to recipients’ self-reliance and resilience. Because of that relationship, the presence of the USAID logo is required.

Solution

We simplified the presentation of the KCEC and USAID logos with a simple side-by-side lockup used throughout the website.

Website

Challenge

Here are just a few of the biggest challenges that the previous KCEC website that had strictly been designed for their trade business only:

The website was outdated and not aesthetically pleasing (those beautiful rugs deserved a better digital home!). We’ve all seen websites that are past their prime and in need of a makeover; and this one definitely was. Period, end of story.
Not only that, the website didn’t properly illustrate the story of KCEC’s artisans and their rugs in its content. We needed to tell a better story.
There was no active blog — a must-have to help increase SEO.
Finally and most importantly, the website had an ineffective user experience and no e-commerce nor was it hosted on a CMS (content management system) that offered this sales functionality — which is mandatory to generate revenue!

Solution

We may have been limited in our creative reach by the prescribed KCEC logo situation, but there would be no such limitation on us when it came to their new website design. We started from scratch to build a fully custom-programmed website with Magento, considering and prioritizing the basic needs of robust e-commerce competency and flexible pages for blog posts and event listings. We spent the most time really customizing the Buy A Rug pages, with product details and imagery. This was not the time or place to use a website builder — like a Wix. KCEC would soon outgrow a platform like that; plus, e-commerce is difficult to integrate and SEO potential is severely limited with those type of solutions.

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