Kirei, Quickly.
Bump up the deadline. Refine the strategy. Launch the products.
Kirei designs and manufactures a wide variety of sustainable, customizable acoustic products for designers, architects, contractors, and end-users to use in commercial applications.
Our client needed a set of new product pages developed and launched on a very accelerated timeline.
A new product line was coming to market quickly. The website and user experience needed to be ready just as quickly to support Kirei’s business goals.
Solspace designed, built and launched an entirely new product line website section in 5 weeks.
Solspace had successfully partnered with Kirei since early 2022, and knew the client’s brand and priorities well. This positioned us to accurately and quickly execute on Kirei’s plan.
We executed the work using our Page Builder approach in Craft CMS, which not only provided rapid development but built flexibility into the system to support the digital marketing team’s needs.
Kirei designs and manufactures a wide variety of sustainable, customizable acoustic products for designers, architects, contractors, and end-users to use in commercial applications. Our client was tasked with quickly creating an impactful new website section and user experience to support the imminent launch of a new product line. In order to stay competitive in the market our client needed to move fast, so Solspace had to move fast too.
Solspace pulled a designer into the team and created a proposal to provide full support for the new product marketing initiative that delivered the excellent user experience needed. To ensure we could design, build, test and launch the new section on time, we employed our tightly phased Page Builder approach in Craft CMS to map out a 5 week timeline. The Page Builder approach allowed for a quick, componentized build and created the perfect combination of control and flexibility for Kirei.
Kirei had been our client for several months leading up to this project. We were already in the early stages of planning for a comprehensive website redesign and rebuild, and had been working through a strategic discovery process. Good progress was being made. But when the company announced the plan for the new product launch, we all had to turn up the heat quickly and apply some of our new findings right away to support the upcoming product launch.
A tight timeline is often a product of market conditions and new realizations within an organization. Sometimes an executive decision is reached that merges the considerations of multiple aspects of a business. Timelines sometimes suffer in this environment. But we understand. And we know how to deliver at top speed without sacrificing the quality of the deliverables or the mental health of the project teams.
Solspace’s job was to keep calm and deliver. When time is tight, the first task after clarifying deliverables and setting priorities is to create a clear, realistic roadmap for the project. There’s almost always a way to make it work, and the Solspace team excels at finding that way.
Since we had already begun work on the full site redesign, you might think this major product launch was an opportunity to accelerate that project and roll the new product section into it. But that would be crazy. We knew from experience that a better path to success in this moment was to invest in creating an outstanding new product section, and then strategically weave new design elements and methods into it once we had carefully completed the plan for the full site with the client. Another factor is that the company had budgeted for the full site rebuild to happen at a later date. Solspace understands the need to support our clients’ business goals as well as their website goals. When an organization is not in a budget cycle that supports large digital investments, we can rethink our deliverables to meet them where they are.
We designed the new section within the existing Kirei style guide, but expanded the design language to support the on time product launch, while building in flexibility for the future.
The Solspace team has been successfully employing a Page Builder approach with Craft CMS to create excellent editorial experiences for our clients. Pages are componentized so that marketing staff can creatively compose new page experiences, while ensuring brand identity and editorial voice are maintained through the use of predetermined constraints. Marketing and editorial teams have been delighted with the results of this approach, as they can rely on the framework while still having creative freedom within it. And Solspace developers love the approach because it enables exceptionally fast and accurate development.
Our Page Builder approach allows us to break the development process into groups of componentized bits that may then be worked in parallel by multiple developers at once, and quickly reassembled into a whole deliverable once completed. This vastly increases development velocity while not sacrificing quality.
Our clients need us to be speedy. But they also need us to hit our numbers and deliver what we’ve promised. They need on time, on target, and on budget delivery. Our road-tested internal processes make this the standard at Solspace.
