MW Industries

eCommerce and Brand Consolidation

  • MW Industries
  • Challenge

    After significant growth through acquisitions, MW Industries needed a central platform to sell their vast library of stock and custom precision metal-based components to manufacturers around the world.

  • Solution

    Merge disparate product data and implement a new CMS and eCommerce platform with a robust product search and purchasing experience.

  • Results

    A consolidated ecosystem of brands and products that leverages acquired product catalogs in a way that dramatically simplifies customers’ user experience and elevates the bottom line for their business.

Growing smarter. Through organic growth and competitor acquisitions, MW Industries has become one of the world’s largest metal-based precision components manufacturers. They came to Viget for help navigating the challenges of their new size – they needed to combine dozens of acquired businesses, including their brands, websites (most of which were not enabled for online purchasing), and product portfolios into one cohesive eCommerce site. We worked alongside MW Industries to build a multi-faceted eCommerce experience to both market and sell their new product lines under a unified brand architecture.

  • An image of the MW Industries website on various screen types - mobile, laptop, tablet, and large monitor.
  • Rethinking The Data and Systems

    How do you put a microscopic screw in the same ecosystem as an auto transmission spring? This is one type of product challenge MW Industries navigated as they consolidated dozens of companies, each with thousands to hundreds of thousands of products, under one new portfolio. We audited, transformed, and migrated tens of millions of data points from disparate legacy SKU databases into a centralized PIM system, Akeneo, that communicates back-and-forth with their Enterprise Resource Planning system, InforVisual, while transforming and cleaning their data for a new Algolia-based product catalog customers can easily search and filter.

  • Craft CMS + Craft Commerce

    We selected Craft as MW Industries’ CMS and eCommerce platform for its seamless integration of product data alongside functionality for their marketing content. MW’s product owners can now customize the front-end display of product data, per family and its variants, regardless of the product category. This meant that MW was able to create a data structure for each of their product categories that perfectly suited how consumers shop for those specific products.

  • Page Design for a component that MW offers
    Product pages powered by Craft, with product data being fed from Akeneo.
  • A more detailed look at a page design for a component that MW offers
    Faceted search and filtering experience powered by Algolia and React.
  • Consolidating Brands

    After tremendous growth, MW Industries needed a website that clearly communicated the same trusted service for existing customers in addition to their new, wider product range offering for new customers. As we built out their new ecosystem, we rooted the entire process in their reimagined brand, retaining customers’ confidence and prior brand loyalty, while introducing them to a larger, and more robust product catalog.

  • Graphic showing all the companies that are now consolidated under the MW Brand
  • "We knew the task of consolidating disparate sites, products offerings, and sales channels wouldn’t be easy. Viget has been a great partner that has executed the project with speed, collaboration, and care. We can now present a unified experience for our customers and have created an excellent platform for continued scale."

    Nina Snelling Chief Digital Officer
  • Grid of types of services MW Industries offers depicted via small illustrations
  • Grid of types of components MW Industries offers depicted via larger detailed illustrations
    Custom illustration of MW's vast product library helped provide a consistent and easy to understand visual language to use across their entire catalog.

Summary

After a significant period of growth, we helped MW Industries merge 20+ product catalogs into one central, modern eCommerce platform that can grow with them and their customers.