King Ranch Saddle Shop is the retail arm of the American legend — King Ranch.
Founded in 1853 by Captain Richard King, the ranch spans over 825,000 acres in South Texas and stands as one of the most storied operations in U.S. history. You’ve seen the iconic “Running W” — stamped on saddles, stitched into apparel, and emblazoned on the side of Ford King Ranch Edition trucks.
King Ranch isn’t just a name — it’s a symbol of rugged, refined Americana. From quarter horses, premium leather goods, and western wear to steak houses, hunting lodges, private label foods, and even John Deere Ag & Turf equipment, the brand holds unmatched equity across industries. It’s not just a ranch. It’s a lifestyle — crafted, trusted, and lived for generations.
Back in 2017, King Ranch originally wanted Joel to overhaul their mail order catalog and website with art direction and media reserved for the most beloved heritage brands in the space. Joel has a good reputation for helping well rooted brands elevate from the pack with a long running track record of success stories. Along with branding came the the website redesign. At first glance, this would seem simple. Design, build, deploy, but this is not that story.
Joel brought in Travis, and together they shot the most beautiful media assets. Together they quickly built up a new aesthetic and visual language that could be distributed across various online and offline collateral. Website pages were designed, Email Templates were created, and we got heads down into the not-so-fun world of Netsuite Suite Commerce Advanced and Netsuite's Bronto Email.
Their site was built on a legacy NetSuite SCA architecture (Mont Blanc 2015) — a modular but outdated system that mimicked some SPA behavior without the performance, flexibility, or developer velocity of a true single-page application. We did the best with what we had and pushed the limits of what could be done with the software for that time. It was good, but we all knew it could be better.
Year after year, season after season, we help internal stake holders tell stories, define campaigns, and distribute brand messaging at scale.
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King Ranch has something really special. When we came on board, we all knew there was a lot of potential to push this brand forward and continue to share the legacy that is American Ranching. It was there in the scorching heat of the Santa Gertrudis desert that we found our brand vision - and it was authenticity. From that day on, we put in the work day in and day out to tell that story and share it with the world.
When you work for a large enterprise you learn to be patient. For years, we petitioned to migrate King Ranch from Netsuite SCA to Shopify Plus. We had all the expertise in spades, but the sign-off was difficult. There are many factors that can prolong a pitch, some is circumstantial (like a change in management - which we saw multiple times within a 3 year window), some of it can be budget (which we did our best to explain that there would be a significant investment due to the size of the migration), and sometimes its just a bit of fear of the unknown. I might also add one more - we are all just busy people trying to keep our varous planes up in the air. Either which way, after a couple years, we finally got the approval and budget to migrate over to Shopify and the party was on!
For the next half a year, we began shifting our tech stack to make way for our new Shopify omni-channel ecosystem. We finally had a chance to properly audit, refine, remove, replace legacy vendors that were not suitable for our growth. We brought in George to once again help us with In8Sync mapping to Netsuite ERP and spun up Klaviyo as we prepared for the phase out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud which would happen just shy of launch.
All the while, we worked tirelessly with an ever changing internal team at King Ranch. We now had new department leads, accounting specialists, digital directors, retail directors, retail staff, and sales directors. The only one that remained the same was Rose Morales. Before the big shake up leading into 2024, Rose was at the helm of every major decision regarding King Ranch Saddle Shop. It was pure joy to have such direct decision making happening in near real time by a single person. That being said, that sort of responsibility does not scale well for a company that is about to go meteoric. Amongst all those that came and went, their was one directive delivered by Mr. Lance Hancock that stood out amongst the rest..."it has to be world-class!"
And that is exactly what we set out to do.
Day in and day our for the next several months, we had strategy sessions, obsessed over product attributes like color, size and leather grains. We chisled away at over 200,000 SKUs, built meaningful collections, told fantastic stories, photographed thousands of products, dribbled over Netsuite ERP nuances, dealt with legacy Gift Card balances, listened to the pain points from retail staff, and held numerous virtual trainings for various staff members - and solved problems.
It was a ton of work - but we had a blast!
Shopify has a simple solution for POS at retail. It takes all the data from Shopify such as products, inventory, discounts, customers, orders, catalogs, and location and gives you an easy to understand ios App to install on any iPad. It is really that simple. Where it can become a bit more complex is when you have custom line item properties for things like our product engraving. Fortunately the Shopify App store is full of solutions. We successfully created staff accounts, set roles, permissions, trained retail managers, and deployed 8+ retail stores across Texas and Oklahoma.
Thanks to the vast array of solutions on the Shopify App store and the power of Shopify Flow, we built a funnel for customer information gathering and automated the followup pipeline to help stakeholders with the heavy lifting.
Browse more of our case studies or reach out to see what custom solutions we can bring to your project.
