How Kaleido switched from WordPress to Storyblok

• Headquarters: Vienna, Austria
• Technology Stack: Ruby, Vue.js

Switching to Storyblok from WordPress

Kaleido’s previous setup was hosted directly through WordPress, where over time, it was found that WordPress was not flexible enough. This was based on the inability to customize the REST API to access the hosted site on WordPress and restricted Kaleido’s scalability to localization and content efforts. As a result, the content team was unable to make simple content edits to the blog, as several technical changes dependent on developers were constantly needed. Kaleido implemented Storyblok on their product sites, accommodating to a global market in their locale. 

Storyblok came onto the scene as the development team experimented with the CMS on some product pages (including remove.bg). Ultimately, it was decided that a centralized content management system would streamline all their efforts and operations.

The next product offering, Unscreen, and Designify, were next in line to move to Storyblok. From the moment Storyblok was adopted, the workflow for the content team became much easier when implementing both content and technical elements. The key features offered by Storyblok that stood out to Kaleido were: 

• Multiple spaces to accommodate different localized markets (opens in a new window)
• Reusable component blocks (opens in a new window) for the marketing team to easily create new pages without the involvement of a developer
• The Visual Editor (opens in a new window) helps content managers see their edits in preview before pushing live
• User Roles (opens in a new window) that could define each user’s access to various areas of Kaleido’s site
• Storyblok’s REST API for content delivery 
• The Centralized content hub and asset library that allows Storyblok to manage content for various products and markets 
• Improved response time and overall better site performance
• The ease in integrating Storyblok to their Ruby on Rails backend (opens in a new window)
• The ability to control how the content is served on the frontend fully (opens in a new window)

Kaleido is the company that launched remove.bg, a visual AI solution that allows the removal of the background of an image by using artificial intelligence - a task that usually involves a graphic designer/editor doing it in Photoshop. remove.bg went viral, allowing Kaleido to grow quickly. This required developing the marketing website alongside.

Kaleido was founded in 2015 before being acquired by Canva in 2021, where their products are now integrated into the suites of Canva products.

Using Storyblok across 3600+ pages

Kaleido uses Storyblok for its main website across 3600+ pages indexed on Google for all of their product offerings and supporting sites such as the blog, help center, and more. Only remove.bg is currently localized for ten languages, where translations are fed via API to the backend (on Ruby on Rails) using Phrase (opens in a new window). The site uses its own Design System “Prism” based on Vue.js 3 as its frontend framework, where all content from Storyblok is cached for improved site speed.