Bringing taonga beyond museum walls
Sharing Aotearoa’s cultural and cricketing history with the world through clean, bold design.
The Brief
In a tiny museum in Wellington there’s a treasure trove of sporting history, unknown to most people. That’s the challenge for the New Zealand Cricket Museum: their 30,000 taonga tell stories of Aotearoa’s rich cultural and cricketing past, but few people know about it. They wanted to share these stories with people across the world, taking a piece of Aotearoa to cricket fans globally.
Together, we created:
- A beautiful experience to share Aotearoa’s heritage through imagery and stories.
- A CMS supporting Cricket Museum to share and showcase more taonga over time.
- 133% increase in enquiries, helping Cricket Museum take the taonga beyond the walls of the physical museum.
A shared understanding of what we want to achieve
Reflecting the Cricket Museum’s vision of sharing Aotearoa’s cultural and cricketing heritage globally was important, with many website visitors coming from overseas. How could we create something to bring these taonga to life for people from India to Ireland? We ran a series of workshops to quickly and efficiently understand their broader strategy, business goals and assumptions. From this series of workshops we collaboratively created a Lean Canvas - a one page plan to help us break down the product, question our assumptions, and give us a shared understanding of what we want to achieve. Setting a solid foundation of collaboration helped us quickly shape the concepts and design direction, guiding us to a place with taonga and their stories at the centre.
More than bats and balls
The history, players and fans of cricket are diverse and global. The website experience is far-reaching, with taonga showcasing the diversity of the sport. The Cricket Museum chose interesting objects, from a 100 year old cricket bat from the Trobriand Islands showing the history of colonisation, to Martin Crowe’s autographed shoes.
"You can see the nicks, the cuts, and even the dirt on the sole. It’s beautiful.”
Suzie Finnigan, Project Manager, Octave
Sharing stories through a uniquely NZ lens
The Cricket Museum wanted to create an experience to share cricketing history through a uniquely NZ lens. We made it easy for them to combine images and text to tell new stories that cover Aotearoa’s diversity, ranging from Blanche Te Rangi, the first start of women’s cricket, to fifty years of Aussie-NZ rivalry. This format is easily extended, enabling the Cricket Museum to add more captivating stories over time. We’re excited to see the website grow and reflect their vision of sharing Aotearoa’s cricketing and cultural heritage with the world.
“Octave truly understood our vision and took the time to learn about our organisation, ultimately delivering an outstanding website that exceeded our expectations. Almost immediately, we've noticed a significant impact. Our visitor numbers increased, and we experienced a surge in enquiries and bookings.””
Jasmine Bailey, Partnerships Manager, Cricket Museum
