Häfele serves and inspires online, worldwide.
admin
- December 2, 2016
Carpenters and architects, as well as retailers and manufacturers from around the world order Häfele’s fittings and connectors in the new online shop. Makers also find instructions, CAD drawings, and inspiration for new projects they can use to impress their own customers.
Häfele, a German maker of construction fittings and connectors, positions itself as a modern German brand that offers high quality products and services, one that knows, understands, supports and inspires its customers. All of these traits needed to come through online.
Häfele’s online shop carries 250,000 products. mediaman optimized product selection and checkout as well as creating cross- and upselling possibilities. Magazine-like stories about furniture and objects connect visitors to the brand and create additional incentives to buy.
The main challenge of the project was that target audiences use the website under different circumstances with different goals: Carpenters and cabinet makers are in their shops, often on older computers. Real estate developers and architects use the website for product selection and price comparison. Manufacturers and retailers look for information and contacts.
In order to roll out the website globally, different content and design tastes have to be considered. Häfele is well known in Germany. Users here like clean, generous and restrained websites. In Thailand, people are just getting to know the company. Style preferences there are colorful and fragmented.
To make things just a bit more complex, the online shop has to make thousands of products in hundreds of thousands of variations accessible to all of these different types of customers.
During our discovery phase, interviews uncovered the needs of target audiences and international markets. It became clear that modular website building blocks had to be developed to satisfy all of these different needs. Häfele needed “One Web”. Search and filter functions in the shop allow products to be discovered intuitively.
Similar and complementary products are displayed; product reviews and sample solutions make the purchase decision easier. The new furniture/project section features stories about innovative solutions made possible with Häfele products, it establishes Häfele as a source of inspiration for carpenters, architects, and real estate developers.
The positive response coming back from the first markets confirms that it pays to invest in discovery and strategy. Early usability testing also brought about more improvements before the platform is rolled out globally.
Next steps involve the implementation of content marketing with furniture and project stories, including social media activities as well as the adaptation of the user experience for mobile.