Jun. 09, 2020

Tom Humbarger

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3 min. read

SearchStax Solution Partners work with us so they can spend more time building exceptional customer experiences while we worry about deploying and managing the Solr search infrastructure that is critical to their projects. To show our appreciation, we regularly produce profiles on our blog so others can see what makes our partners special. Our latest profile is with UK-based digital agency Kagool.

Who is Kagool?

Founded in Cardiff, UK in 1999, Kagool started out as a technical agency under the name ‘Fusionworkshop’. After a few years, founder and current executive chairman Chris Short and his team quickly identified the potential of focusing on the Sitecore platform and firmly believed that becoming a Sitecore specialised agency was the best fit for the business.

In 2015, the agency rebranded to Kagool after deciding that their identity needed to evolve in line with the agency as a business. A cagoule or kagool is a bit geeky, but totally reliable in its purpose — so the name reflects that they are a group of super smart people who are ‘reassuringly geeky’ and will get the best job done. According to Director Craig Johnson, “we are unique in the industry and we needed a unique identity to match”.

Kagool now has over 70 professionals scattered across their UK offices (Cardiff, Manchester and London) and have successfully completed over 300 Sitecore projects for a variety of sectors. Kagool is a Sitecore Platinum Partner and four of their team members were recognized as Sitecore Most Valuable Professionals or (MVPs) for 2020. The Sitecore MVP is a highly competitive award that recognizes about 300 individuals globally each year for their knowledge, expertise and participation in Sitecore communities.

Kagool’s 2020 Sitecore MVPs

What Types of Services Does Kagool Offer?

Kagool offers five primary Sitecore services: Sitecore, Digital Strategy, Design, Sitecore Support and Search and Performance Marketing:

  • Sitecore Service includes enterprise website development, personalization and marketing automation 
  • Digital Strategy transforms business processes with digital tools and expertise
  • Design uses human-centered design to provide unique customer experiences and supports that with user testing and research
  • Sitecore Support offers proactive support along with Sitecore audits, health checks and performance tuning
  • Search and Performance Marketing helps to increase organic traffic to websites with SEO and pay-per-click strategies, social media and conversion rate optimization

Kagool and SearchStax have partnered on several projects and one of them will be coming online in the next few months.

Where Do You See the Sitecore Market Going?

Darren Webb, head of development at Kagool answered this question for us:

“The recent acquisition of Stylelabs, now Sitecore Content Hub, is a game changer in the whole DAM, DRM, PIM areas. In addition, Sitecore announced in Q4 2019 that it was working on a Content Management SaaS offering which will have a huge impact and will appeal to new customers looking for a fully featured experience platform. Content Hub and a SaaS offering in the pipeline is clearly showing that Sitecore will continue to push the platform.”

Why did Kagool Partner with SearchStax?

In his own words, Darren Webb explains why Kagool partnered with SearchStax:

We had previous experience with SearchStax through our work with City Football Group, so they were a known quantity to us. What pushed us to get on-board with Searchstax at this time is that our customer base is growing, and our customers are becoming larger. 

We have experienced specific Sitecore Solr challenges over the past 18 months that really pushed our knowledge of the underlying Solr technology stack and we realized that Solr isn’t part of our fundamental skill set. It was a gap that needed to be filled in by a partner so we can provide a fully supported Sitecore application landscape. 

We always want to give our customers 100% and they expect us to support Solr, since it is integral to the Sitecore application running. In our minds, it made sense to look for specific Solr expertise to fill our knowledge gap so that we could maintain a premium level of service.”

By Tom Humbarger

Senior Product Marketing Manager

“…search should not only be for those organizations with massive search budgets.”

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