CASE STUDY
Wahl Global
CHALLENGE
Wahl, a leading manufacturer of men’s hair clippers and beard trimmers, wanted to enhance their global brand perception with a reimagined website. Launching a global website is no easy feat for any digital team. But an even bigger challenge is launching multiple websites under one brand enabling global country managers to edit and maintain any aspect of their individual site.
SOLUTION
The new collection of websites features a responsive experience in which each site administrator can easily update and maintain their local website, ensuring their content is tailored to their unique geography and culture.
Easy to use CMS for admins to keep websites optimized and up to date
Responsive platform for different languages, culture, and product variety
Ability to create unique content for their specific country or regional needs
RO!
In order for Wahl to keep up with their growing global markets, it was necessary to create a website that could not only grow with expanding country content, but also scale when Wahl entered new countries. It was imperative for us to build a flexible website that would maintain brand consistency while accommodating Wahl's continued growth in new and existing markets.
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Websites
Built Internationally
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Languages
Optimized for
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Admins
Within the CMS
APPROACH
Discovery & Research
After a thorough competitive analysis and several one-on-one stakeholder interviews, we gathered a full list of features necessary to meet each country’s website requirements. It was crucial that we understood how to organize a website to meet the needs of different countries and category priorities in the beginning phases of this project. Throughout this process, we also tested with consumers to validate the overall site information architecture (IA), as well as overall usability.
Iterative Collaboration Between Teams
The seamless collaboration between client service, user experience (UX), design, and the development teams were crucial in the success of this project. We followed the agile method, which kept the team up to date in real-time with any changes. The success of this project required a full team of developers to share knowledge to successfully execute a well-functioning product listing page with filtering complexities, and to accommodate a variety of products across different countries.
The CMS
From the discovery phase, we identified a sizable gap between the quantity and quality of content from each existing market. Hoffman York was tasked with organizing the content and building the environment where it would all live. As with any website build, the selection of the content management system (CMS) is an incredibly important decision. We selected Kentico because of the overall needs of Wahl's global country managers, existing content, and capacity for additional future content.
Design System and Content Guidelines
This guide was intended to show internal teams the components library and guide admins when to use which modules within their site to create a seamless brand experience for consumers. By following the best practices guide, different regions were given the flexibility to create their own website catered specifically to their culture, languages and various products, while still maintaining the consistency of the Wahl Global brand.
Agile Content Entry
Each country had varying levels of resources allowing them to begin work on updating their websites. Many country site admins had little exposure to website development projects. Knowing content creation would be a time-consuming task, we incorporated a strategy that would allow our development team to build the web components while simultaneously allowing country managers to create content. We were able to accomplish this by utilizing a tool called Gather Content. While our developers built custom modules on the site, the site admins were able to create content that would live within the Gather Content modules.
Training Regional Admins Across the World
The most exciting yet challenging aspect of the project was developing relationships with the dozens of site admins and teaching them how to use their new website CMS. Our goal was to empower each admin to become the expert in the back end of their country's website, so they were not required to rely on our team for ongoing updates. After weeks of late night and early morning calls spanning across global time zones, we can confidently say we provided each admin with ample training to lead and manage their web content specifically tailored to their geography.
