Expedition Baikal

Background

Mammut is a Swiss company that manufactures and sells alpine and outdoor products for mountaineers and outdoor enthusiasts. Their mission is to connect people to the mountains, not only with the products they make but by the experiences they create.

Idea

Expedition Baikal was an immersive shopping experience which took shoppers deep into the heart of Siberia. The minisite for Mammut’s top-of-the-range Eiger Extreme collection followed Swiss extreme mountaineer, Dani Arnold, as he journeyed into the heart of Siberia to conquer ten new ice climbing routes, braving roaring winds, snow and ice. Arnold’s expedition was to a place so extreme that few athletes have dared to explore it: Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on earth, with temperatures as low as -40°C.

As users scrolled they were taken to mountains, cliffs, walls of ice, caves and of course the frozen lake. Stunning photography with sound effects, quotes from Dani Arnold, visuals and video were integrated into the experience.

Eight different products, including Dani’s jacket, snow trousers, helmet and harness, were featured in pop-ups as he used them.

Expedition Baikal brought together the beauty of the real world with the possibilities of the digital world to allow users to share Dani’s journey.

Results

Expedition Baikal won Awwwards E-commerce Site of the Year, the fourth consecutive win for the agency.

Our Thoughts

I can’t remember the last interesting website I visited.

Most of them are FourSquare standard or they are purely cupboards for you to pick items from. So this was a surprise and then a delight to scroll down and through and across, encountering audio, video and great photography on the way. Great demos of the Mammut gear. £585 is pricey but at temperatures of -40°, you need a pretty special jacket to climb in. And this site provides ample evidence of that.

(Climbing on icicles looks frankly terrifying to me.)