Sherwin-Williams
Website Redesign
The Assignment
Sherwin-Williams’ PCG digital ecosystem is comprised of a significant number of sites, divisions, regions and microsites that all required consideration. They lived across a variety of platforms, some hard to manage and some extremely out-of-date, both technically and aesthetically.
We established a new, consolidated user experience based on a single platform (AEM) with an improved content authoring experience. The deliverables and documentation created during this project were based upon the direction of PCG leadership, and focused on PCG’s North American Region, while considering global implications. Initial languages considered were English, Spanish and Canadian French, and will expand to other countries and languages in future iterations.
Initially, direction called for a porting over of the The Americas Group site’s current look and feel with additional ADA compliance considerations...
The Key Insight
Sherwin-Williams has a reputation for being a very human-centered brand, focused on providing expert knowledge and superior customer satisfaction, both locally and globally. Being able to replicate the same level of customer centricity online as our people in the field is exciting and transformational to our business.
Based upon this revelation, we presented an additional concept centered around a more prominent design evolution. The Sherwin-Williams leadership team unanimously chose to move forward with this concept, solidifying our position as true partners while creating additional business on our end.
While this decision required an overhaul of Sherwin-Williams' digital brand standards, it was of utmost importance that all decisions be aimed towards improving compliance with ADA standards and establishing styles that could be leveraged for GDPR.
A Purposeful Shift
Bringing all of the groups together from around the world and across the Performance Coating Groups divisions, aligning on requirements, features, content governance, and laying out and entering all content consistently across standard page layouts was a challenge that we must meet head-on.
Customers have higher expectations and demand more personalized experiences, and more innovative, solutions-based guidance. Moreover, they value partnerships over providers. With that in mind, we worked to develop an appropriate content strategy, utilizing our customer personas, and laid out information in a manner that made it easy for all users to find the information they need in order to make informed decisions. We are strategic partners, providing clear messaging and guidance through experiences that customers will want to come back to. This will satisfy the increasing desire for brands that don’t just satisfy a market need, but actually enable businesses to innovate and reach their next levels of growth.
What is the Main Idea: The North Star?
We strongly believed that creating a consistent experience across all divisions with standard page layouts and a scalable, consistent approach to authoring and setting up sites would allow Sherwin-Williams to move faster to build stronger brand recognition and create the appearance of one unified company. This would allow them to focus on the expansion and improvement of their overall content strategy, an approach that would continue to position them as the industry experts and enable them to experience truly transformative growth as they move into the interactive and personalization tracks of the project.
Our Opportunity
The old site had been self-described as “consistently subpar brochureware.” This was our chance to architect a thoughtful and consistent design system across all of the PCG digital properties. In general, the industry is poor for large OEM experiences—lots of room for improvement. With this redesign, we can start to reposition Sherwin-Williams as an industry leader and eventually become the benchmark upon which all strive for.
