BORA Website Relaunch

The Customer

BORA develops and produces innovative premium built-in kitchen appliances with high design standards. The German-Austrian group of companies positions its portfolio internationally with the claim 'More than cooking'. Since Willi Bruckbauer founded BORA in 2007, the company has aspired to challenge the status quo and revolutionize the kitchen as a living space. The mission: extraordinary products for extraordinary experiences. BORA employs over 500 people worldwide, particularly at its sites in Raubling, Niederndorf and Sydney as well as in the flagship stores in Munich and Herford. BORA products are now sold in over 60 countries worldwide.

Requirement

The customer wanted a complete relaunch of the company website, including numerous features to adequately address all target groups, guarantee optimal user guidance and improve SEO performance. The new website had to communicate the company's image perfectly to the outside world and recognize BORA's market leadership. 

In addition, all individual systems were to be combined within an integrated platform for product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM) and content management system (CMS). New interfaces to other company systems such as the event organization and enterprise resource planning (ERP) were to be implemented. The requirements in this context also included the further development of the corporate design and the conception of suitable design elements for the product worlds.  

Integrated cooperation between the respective specialist departments at valantic DXA and BORA was to ensure a continuous, optimized process flow.  

Additionally, the client desired consulting support in optimizing the individual internal system landscapes.

Implementation

Initially, the customer's existing systems were reviewed. An individual strategy was developed for each system to determine whether and how the respective system could be mapped or connected in Pimcore. A roadmap for the initial go-live and subsequent adjustments was developed from a joint workshop and in constant close cooperation with all internal departments and external service providers. The hard deadline was set as the opening of the flagship store in Herford and the simultaneous in-house exhibition with the launch of new products. In order to meet the hard deadline, an MVP (Minimum Valuable Project) was defined for the project. During the entire MVP, colleagues were fully occupied with supporting the current processes, while another colleague was already discussing, defining and preparing prospective future topics. Work was therefore carried out in parallel on two different project timelines.

The project was deliberately set up to be very agile, with individual focus topics being defined on a regular basis, but the prioritization could also be adjusted if necessary.

valantic DXA was responsible for designing the new website in close coordination with the responsible specialist departments at Bora. In addition, valantic DXA's creative and marketing departments took on advisory and active tasks in areas such as corporate design, adaptation of design elements, UX and technical SEO. Due to the enormous challenges and the desired combination of PIM, CMS and DAM, the project was set up in Pimcore - this measure was fully supported by the customer.

A central platform for PIM, DAM and CMS was initially developed, which offers additional interfaces for all internal company systems and the ERP. The front-end implementation was carried out entirely by Storybook. In the course of development, the internal developers on the customer side were trained in both Pimcore and Storybook so that they can continue to develop the project together with our experts in the future.

In the first step, the website's language guidance was only developed for the language variants de-de, de-at and en-int. All other languages and CMS pages were redirected to the client's existing Typo3 site via a reverse proxy. Further conversion is to take place successively. In the course of redesigning the corporate design, a new concept was developed for the BORA product worlds and incorporated into new design elements. The focus here was the development of an overarching scrollytelling concept, which was individually designed for each product by valantic DXA and maintained via the backend. The close cooperation between the creation and development departments guaranteed a fast and clean implementation of the scrollytelling. As a result, the website not only appears more modern, but each product now also attracts more attention. Scrollytelling also has a positive effect on usability.

The website was technically optimized by the marketing department during the development phase according to the latest standards - here too, the close contact between the departments involved had a very positive effect on the project design.

After implementing all the tasks relevant to the first phase, the site went live on time. As the language variants were still created in Pimcore 10 due to the hard deadline, an update to Pimcore 11 was carried out in the post go-live phase. Further updates and minor changes will be carried out at regular intervals. Further adjustments and the expansion of the concept to other language variants will be successively adapted in the further course of the project so that the complete BORA universe can be mapped in Pimcore at the end of the project. New features and adaptations are published in a bi-weekly release cycle in coordination with the customer.

In addition to the MVP project and ongoing support, valantic DXA experts are available to advise the customer on numerous topics and provide assessments and feedback. The close cooperation between the individual specialist departments is therefore also strictly adhered to in the further course of the process.

Conclusion

The new BORA website perfectly reflects the company's brand essence. It is aesthetically pleasing, extremely performant and meets or even exceeds all current standards. Above all, however, it focuses on the user. Thanks to a clear structure in the backend and intuitive user guidance as well as an appealing UX, visitors can access the pages relevant to them very quickly and easily. It doesn't matter which channels the different target groups use to access the site - users can reach their destination in just a few clicks. Scrollytelling in particular ensures an outstanding user experience and thus guarantees that the target groups identify with the brand. Bora is a market leader and thought leader - and the new website expresses this perfectly.