Listings that update themselves, and a search that never hides a yacht.

The Brief

Our end client, a brokerage that sells and charters superyachts, was rebranding and needed a new website live for the Monaco Yacht Show in September. The partner agency designed it and looked after the client; 1994 rebuilt it from their designs, sat in the calls and advised on what the brokerage's systems could do.

The brokerage already ran its own yacht management system, which fed the old website in its own time. This time, any change made there had to be on the site straight away, in both languages. Buyers had to be able to narrow a large, changing stock to a shortlist in seconds, on a phone as easily as at a desk. And the brokerage's own team had to be able to run the site without ever touching a yacht listing.

The process

The yacht management system already held everything, so rather than replace it we changed how it talked to the website. Instead of the site waiting for a sync, the system now pushes every change the moment it is made. The sales team edits a yacht where they always have, and it is on the site before they have closed the tab. When a yacht sells, it drops out of the listings on its own. Both language versions come from the same feed, so there is no second set of pages to keep in step. We also made the site careful about what it accepts: a feed that arrives incomplete is turned away rather than quietly removing yachts that were never meant to go.

The search is the part buyers see. Sliders for price, length and guests, the length in metres or feet with one click, plus builder and year for yachts for sale and destinations for charter. Results arrive as fast as the slider moves, on a phone as much as a desktop. A yacht priced on application, or with a detail missing, still shows up. Every search sits in the address bar, so a buyer can send the link to a partner and both see the same shortlist. A single search box also covers yachts for sale, yachts for charter and destinations in one go.

Under the hood it is built on Craft CMS, with Algolia running the search and Alpine JS and Tailwind CSS delivering the partner agency's designs.

The result

The site went live in time for Monaco. For the brokerage's own team, the website is now only ever about the website: pages, news, destinations, the team. The yachts look after themselves. The feedback since launch has been that it is far easier to work with than what came before, and that the speed, of the pages and of the search, is the thing people notice first.

New yacht in the feed, new yacht on the site. Nobody typed a thing.