Platforming & e-commerce: Taking a modern masterlock.com global
What We Did
Flexed masterlock.com redesign experience for a European audience, customizing tech, design and content to meet business and consumer goals.
The Result
A forward-thinking e-commerce experience that provided a modernized digital experience.
Redesigning a legacy brand's digital experience
We positioned Master Lock in the modern e-commerce space through cross-discipline expertise and user understanding.
Our work for Master Lock is constantly grounded in the brand’s history and authority in the security space. Master Lock is a household name, but just because it has a century-plus reputation doesn’t mean it should carry dated branding, creatively or functionally. For masterlock.com—along with the brand's website for Europe, masterlock.eu — translating this legacy with a layer of modernization was essential for the digital e-commerce audience.
Modernizing the brand meant improving the overall online shopping experience
Our team launched a refreshed version of masterlock.com that included new designs, new content, new tools and integration with new e-commerce software. Two years in the making, this required a comprehensive rework of content across the website, data reorganization, product filtering, delivery of a style guide and more. Our team also introduced a new, improved and easily accessible product selector to help users find their perfect lock in four simple steps. Since then, we’ve continued to evolve Master Lock’s e-commerce infrastructure with more robust tools, integrating with Shopify and PriceSpider to create a seamless shopping experience.
Evolving e-commerce globally
When the Master Lock team in Europe was ready for a redesign of masterlock.eu, our thinking flexed from our previous experience in several ways to make sure our approach optimized e-commerce from all angles. First, we had to consider audience implications. A European website meant evaluating content through the lens of a European audience, integrating a language selector and considering the European Union’s data privacy laws (GDPR). Second, this project wasn’t just a redesign, it was a re-platforming effort. All content would eventually be migrated to a new content management system (CMS), which had to support design along with data integration for over 1,600 products.
Translating for more than language
Solving for the content challenge relied heavily on a current-state audit. The process included a detailed assessment of content on a per-page basis, identifying areas of improvement and opportunities to consolidate or discard in the migration based on relevance or analytics.
The auditing process set the foundation for everything that would eventually move over to the new platform, so client input was critical from start to finish. Conversations with Master Lock's European team allowed us to fully understand audience priorities and expectations when shopping, which informed how we labeled product categories, organized FAQs, optimized content for search and more.
To accommodate seven languages, our team incorporated a language selector tool that worked with a third-party integration from MotionPoint. Upon arrival to the website, users could select their language preference, and their selection would translate the site content accordingly.
Adopting new technologies and enhancing old ones
Re-platforming masterlock.eu started with a CMS evaluation and selection. Prioritizing the need for an enterprise-level e-commerce solution, the Master Lock team selected Bloomreach—a partner that was new to us. We quickly learned how to use the CMS to display what we wanted in the front end. Because Bloomreach’s out-of-the-box components were not compatible with some of the modernized design thinking, we also built a flexible component library that allowed the European team to customize their pages and content. However, the biggest challenge presented itself in the product data, which was located across four to five different technologies. We solved this hurdle with a custom architecture that funneled all the data into the CMS smoothly and accurately for each individual lock, safe and accessory in the masterlock.eu product portfolio.
Meeting business and consumer goals
The big-picture goal for masterlock.eu was a strategically guided CMS refresh for an updated look, feel and function. We achieved this with parallel efforts in platform exploration and architecture, user-first design thinking and a content strategy tailored for the European audience. For Master Lock, these efforts refined their website for users across Europe, establishing a stronger digital sales presence and enhancing it with modern design and functionality. For consumers, the entire shopping experience was optimized, from locating products to finding support to engaging with the brand story.