Site of the Month: Häfele

Häfele has a reputation for performance that spans 150 countries and over 90 years. When they were seeking to build a new website to showcase their products, they turned to SilverStripe Professional Partner, Toast, who brought to life Häfele’s digital shopfront in a slick, multifunctional platform for consumers and designers.

Project background and discovery

When Häfele decided they needed a new digital platform to showcase their products, they looked no further than Toast. Both companies believe in combining innovation, style, and function.

Häfele had a clear vision for their new online flagship: visual design that reflected their modern, clean, and functional brand image, and a CMS that would provide them with the ability to efficiently manage their product library and marketing campaigns.

Within the discovery process, it was clear that the website needed to guide a visitor through Häfele’s range and to get them inspired on the journey of planning, through to choosing their products, and finding local designers and retailers. This experience required the ability for a visitor to create and save wishlists and locations, and send that wishlist to a chosen designer.

A digital platform to elevate Häfele

Designing and creating has never been more inspiring that with Häfele. The new platform not only meets the needs of today’s online consumer, but scales to ensure that Häfele has a digital platform that elevates them in their market.

Using SilverStripe 4 as the CMS, combined with the SilverShop e-commerce module, Toast brought to life Häfele’s digital shopfront, featuring clean, straightforward design, stunning imagery, and the iconic use of red.

The website also features:

• Intuitive navigation, minimising the number of clicks required for visitors to get where they need to be
• An inspiration section, guiding visitors on a visually stimulating journey through Häfele’s range
• Hotspot functionality, offering the ability to select specific products and bring them directly to the product page, where visitors can view associated products, download catalogues, and find stockists

SilverStripe modules used on this project

Toast utilised a number of SilverStripe modules to achieve the desired functionality and outcomes for Häfele.

• SilverShop provides a framework for building and customising e-commerce-based projects, including facilities for customers to browse products and place orders, and for administrators to manage products
• SilverStripe Linkable allows users to seamlessly add links to web pages and files
• Redirected URLs provides a system for users to configure redirections in the CMS that can be used for legacy redirections, friendly URLs, and anything else that involves redirecting one URL to another
• SilverStripe QuickBlocks provides an easy-to-implement content blocks system for SilverStripe 4.x
• SilverStripe 4 SEO provides an easily managed process to edit data tracked by search engines

A team of clever little developers and designers

Auckland-based and supporting clients globally, Toast thrive on delivering client success. A Professional Partner since 2015, they’re one of the early adopters of SilverStripe and their portfolio boasts some exemplary digital projects. They’re also active contributors to the SilverStripe community with open source modules.

"We spent a lot of time looking for the right CMS to develop with," says Alastair Wilson, Digital Director at Toast. "For us, SilverStripe is the best. Now, it's our knitting and we stick to it."

Toast strive for more than a business partnership with their clients, instead seeking a relationship where success is mutual. They achieve this by combining innovative thinking and quality design to help strengthen and promote the brands they work with.

They also work on the principle that a company website has a crucial role, that is presenting products and services both professionally and usefully to potential customers, and making the user journey to purchase as simple as possible.

Like what you see here?

If you’re interested in working with Toast, you can visit their website or contact them directly.

Interested in becoming a SilverStripe Partner?

Check out the SilverStripe Professional Partner Programme.