Over the last few months, we've been working on some big changes behind the scenes. Today, we're excited to announce (and introduce you to) Kastle Rentals 2.0, and share what's new.
What's new?
In short:
A new and improved website design
The Kastle Rentals Renter Dashboard is live
Over a dozen new equipment pieces added to our catalogue (more coming soon)
Preparation for the first release of our first batch of Kastle Production-ready Kits
More blog posts & content across our social channels
The details
Meet the new Kastle Rentals website
Our new-and-improved website design, in addition to providing a better mobile experience, makes it easier to explore the catalogue, find exactly what equipment you need, and put together your rental quote.
We've achieved this by optimizing the site to better match our brand guidelines, including our colour palette, photo style, and general consistency throughout the entire experience. The process has included optimizing our catalogue pages so related items are more appropriately grouped together, and entirely redesigning our product pages with a cleaner photo style*, a cleaner description of what each kit/equipment item includes, and additional item-specific information to help you decide whether or not a specific piece of equipment is helpful in context of your use case.
Introducing the Renter Dashboard
The Kastle Rentals Renter Dashboard is exciting for four big reasons:
It saves you time (66% faster than email back-and-forth**)
It's easy to use (everything is labeled)
It's actually useful (everything you need to see is right there... plus additional features, such as our newly introduced Return Checklist)
It makes Producers happy (everything -- from your quote, to your paperwork, to the logistics -- is organized, so no need to go digging through old email chains).
Our growing catalogue
Our catalogue is constantly growing with equipment that we believe is in demand, helpful, and provides a higher-quality experience for anyone renting from us. Our equipment catalogue has recently grown to include the Zoom F6, Digital Juice Pro Flag Kit (finally, flags!), Rokinon 85mm T1.5 Cine DS, Lexar CFast Cards and the Lexar CFast Reader, the Flycam VISTA-II Arm and Vest, the Cinebags CB25 Revolution Backpack (useful for run-and-gun or docu-style productions -- and if requested, we pre-organize the CB25 to hold your equipment), and lots more.
Coming soon: Kastle Production-ready Kits
We've been working on something exciting, that we're almost ready to share (...but we'll share a little bit right now...): our first batch of Kastle Production-ready Kits.
Some items are often rented together, or make more sense to be bundled due to them serving specific use cases, or helping with specific jobs on set. Kastle Production-ready Kits take this one step further with pre-organized, production-ready packages. Details coming soon!
The new blog... and socials!
Across our social channels, we're sharing and publishing more content that's meant to be helpful, provide insight into us, the industry, our equipment, and lots more; if you have suggestions for anything you'd like covered, let us know.
(PS... our Instagram, TikTok, and X are linked here.)
*Completed with all of our new equipment; improved photos for some of our older catalogue items are still in progress.
**Our initial testing period showed a 66% decrease (on average) in the amount of time it took to finalize rental details, when using the new Renter Dashboard (versus the email-thread system that was previously the standard).
