JCB

Building adventures for the next generation of explorers

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, JCB saw an opportunity to engage families and younger audiences through a digital-first experience. Partnering with Atomic, they launched JCB Explore, an immersive e-commerce and content platform that brought the brand’s world of “constructive play” to life. Combining education, entertainment, and shopping in one seamless experience, the platform was designed to inspire the future generation of innovators, while driving measurable commercial growth

14,800%

Increase in organic traffic

Google ranking for “Digger Toys”

Increase in site traffic within six months

“

We’ve been hugely impressed with how Atomic have taken the many strands and challenges we set and shaped an engaging new digital space for our kids and family audience. The site has delivered significant increases in conversions since its launch.

Senior Licensing Manager

JCB

Screenshot of an online store showing search results for digger, including toy diggers, a child’s overall, and a ride-on digger, all branded JCB. Filters and sorting options appear on the left side.

The challenge

Creating a purposeful digital experience to entertain, educate, and convert

With families confined to their homes during lockdown, JCB needed to evolve their engagement strategy, and fast.

The challenge was to create an online destination that would reflect JCB’s core values of entertainment, education, and real-world experiences, while also serving as an effective e-commerce platform.

The digital experience had to speak to both children and parents, combining imaginative storytelling with serious retail performance.

A smiling young boy in a red shirt rides a small yellow toy JCB vehicle outdoors, with a real yellow construction vehicle and green building visible in the background.

Children and adults play on and around a large yellow digger in an outdoor playground with ride-on toy vehicles and a circular obstacle in the background. Several people are smiling and waving at the camera.

The solution

A branded digital playground centred on constructive play

Atomic worked in close partnership with JCB to design and build a bespoke e-commerce platform grounded in the brand’s ethos of Constructive Play.

The site combined immersive storytelling and educational content with a seamless shopping experience optimised for families.

Best-practice UX and SEO principles were applied throughout, ensuring the platform was intuitive to use and highly discoverable in search. Real-world imagery, branded character content, and interactive features captured the imaginations of younger users, while parents could easily explore and purchase products with confidence.

The result was a digital experience that was both playful and commercially effective – a balance rarely achieved in the children’s retail space.

A greyscale wireframe of multiple website pages displayed at angles, showing layouts with blocks for images, headings, navigation menus, and placeholder text for various categories and activities.

A digital dashboard shows survey results, bar charts, heatmaps, and statistics, with colourful graphs and data visualisations organised in separate card-like sections on a light background.

A black-and-white JCB Kids coloring sheet shows a cartoon truck carrying a dumper truck, both with smiling faces, on a white background with a yellow corner. The sheet has JCB branding and COLOURING SHEET text at the top.

Three JCB learn together cards on an orange background display the numbers 0 (zero), 1 (one), and 2 (two) in large black font with corresponding words below each number.

The outcome

From pandemic pivot to permanent digital success

JCB Explore launched during lockdown as a timely response to changing customer needs, but quickly proved itself a long-term strategic asset.

The site doubled traffic in six months and has since achieved over 14,800% growth in organic search traffic, thanks to a focused keyword strategy and continuous SEO improvement.

Ranking #1 on Google for “Digger Toys”, it now outperforms retail giants like Amazon and Smyths.

With Atomic retained for SEO and social marketing, JCB Explore continues to grow as both a family engagement hub and a high-performing e-commerce channel, bringing brand storytelling and retail strategy together under one playful, powerful roof.