Little Adventures

The Challenge

Destin-Fort Walton Beach wanted to draw visitors to nature, and the local community with them. The destination had committed to getting kids out on the water, inspired by a global study of how little time children spend outdoors.

The program is built on free, 60-minute classes taught by local experts, for ages 3 to 13 and up. Beach Scouts run the classes on the shoreline. Online Scouts, local parents, help families plan. One channel could not carry all of that. The program needed several ways to engage people.

The brief carried four requirements:

• Plan the trip: Families needed a digital way to plan their time in Destin-Fort Walton Beach before they arrived.
• Serve the beach: The on-beach experience had to work for the parents and for the children taking part.
• Build a destination that can leave: The program needed an outpost building that worked as a destination point and could be removed from the beach for seasonal weather and sea turtle nesting season.
• Move: The program had to go to people, so a Sprinter van and mobile trailers became part of the solution.

The team then widened the program's reach by partnering with local charter fishing captains. Teens discover new wildlife through fishing and compete against other captains and their teams in the Reel Time tournament. That required a mobile app that worked on land and at sea.

Our Process

Destination marketing often hands visitors a checklist of places. Little Adventures was built to go beyond that, a goal the destination stated at launch. No Luggage brought deep domain expertise in the tourism sector and a strategy that was one-of-a-kind in the industry: build a program, with classes, local experts, Scouts, and places to meet them, then design the products to deliver it. This was different.

No Luggage also brought a deep research background and a clear understanding of what visitors look for in a children's beachfront program. EKKO worked with No Luggage and multiple stakeholders to turn that strategy into products, producing schematics for buildings and vehicles, a website, and a mobile app under one brand.

The physical products were built to be specific and practical:

• EKKO took the outpost from concept drawings into construction, managed the build with a portable-building manufacturer, and staged it with electrical and solar systems before it went to the beach.
• A standard teardrop trailer design was customized to support classes on the sand. Two towable units can be pulled by a utility vehicle or a light-duty pickup.
• A Sprinter van was fitted out as a driveable outpost with solar power.
• A cellular booster at the stationary outpost gave staff a reliable signal for data-heavy tools on the beach.

The website follows the way families plan. They browse free classes by age, interest, or location, register for a spot, and connect with Scouts for local tips.

Outcome

Destination marketing often hands visitors a checklist of places. Little Adventures was built to go beyond that, a goal the destination stated at launch. No Luggage brought deep domain expertise in the tourism sector and a strategy that was one-of-a-kind in the industry: build a program, with classes, local experts, Scouts, and places to meet them, then design the products to deliver it. This was different.

No Luggage also brought a deep research background and a clear understanding of what visitors look for in a children's beachfront program. EKKO worked with No Luggage and multiple stakeholders to turn that strategy into products, producing schematics for buildings and vehicles, a website, and a mobile app under one brand.

The physical products were built to be specific and practical:

• EKKO took the outpost from concept drawings into construction, managed the build with a portable-building manufacturer, and staged it with electrical and solar systems before it went to the beach.
• A standard teardrop trailer design was customized to support classes on the sand. Two towable units can be pulled by a utility vehicle or a light-duty pickup.
• A Sprinter van was fitted out as a driveable outpost with solar power.
• A cellular booster at the stationary outpost gave staff a reliable signal for data-heavy tools on the beach.

The website follows the way families plan. They browse free classes by age, interest, or location, register for a spot, and connect with Scouts for local tips.

Why It Matters

A strategy only works when the products under it do. No Luggage's expertise in tourism set the direction, and each product was designed to remove one barrier between a family and a first try: not knowing what to book, not knowing where to go, or not having a way to get there.

For EKKO, the work spanned web, physical structures, vehicles, and mobile. The medium changed each time. The approach did not. We started with how and why people use what we design, and built each piece to carry the same experience from a phone to the beach to a boat.