Napoleon

The Client

North America’s largest privately owned manufacturer of wood and gas fireplaces, gas and charcoal grills, outdoor living products, and heating and cooling products, Wolf Steel Ltd. is the parent company of several consumer brands including the well-known luxury Napoleon® line of grills and BBQs. The company operates 1,200,000 square feet of manufacturing space and employs over 1,200 people. Napoleon product distribution covers all of North America, Europe, the Middle East and reaches into the Far East, Australia and New Zealand.

The Situation

As the Napoleon brand accelerates worldwide and into new markets, its parent company recognized a need for an efficient and scalable solution that would not only resolve existing issues but also elevate its online presence and its sales/customer service experience. Additionally, it needed to empower its marketing team to control all distribution channels and all product lines. With the goals of consolidating 20 existing domains into a new one while simultaneously reducing human errors and improving efficiency, the Napoleon team ultimately wanted to create a system that was able to keep up with the company’s rapid growth.   

The Challenge

Napoleon’s technical care team was responsible for supporting and maintaining dozens of distinct web properties marketed in different countries and languages. And the individual web properties were built on a range of technologies, each with differing levels of functionality and ages. Older sites were difficult to update and lacked modern personalization. Additionally, the customer order management, site content update, and product update processes were complicated, leaving them vulnerable to human error. The team’s workload and the range of technologies in use led to product information fragmentation and missed opportunities for marketing tactics that supported sales follow-through and customer service.

The Solution

Working with Digital Echidna, the teams took a phased approach to the transformation. After research and discovery, DE led the content audit and migration prior to the launch, consolidating all existing Napoleon-branded domains under a single domain. The teams deployed Acquia Personalization to unify content and data and serve targeted, personalized content to site visitors. Additionally, DE spearheaded the integration of systems to enhance the site’s language capabilities, automate product data updates and pull in reviews and ratings. 

The Results

The new Napoleon.com — a seamless, personalized online experience built on Drupal — is a fully responsive solution that centralizes the management of all former domains and marketing campaigns into a single extendable, flexible framework. Key results include:

• Domain Authority score increased by five points after consolidation and launch
• Page load times decreased from 7.8 seconds to less than 3 seconds 
• Site uptime dramatically improved; from the legacy DNN sites being down multiple times a day to being 99.9 percent reliable
• The new site is able to serve targeted, multilingual content while still maintaining a consistent brand UI/UX 
• Sales are now able to target promotions simultaneously by product and region
• The platform fully supports personalization of the web experience based on user segmentation